Is it possible to automate cybersecurity? The general consensus is that automation is inapplicable in areas that need complex judgment and decision-making. Because detecting cyber risks is not as simple as withdrawing cash from an ATM, it’s understandable why people believe cybersecurity and automation are incompatible.
The use of automation in security assessments is becoming more and more common. It’s no longer merely an issue of following trends and improving efficiency to embrace them. There is a slew of other strong reasons to automate, which are detailed below.
What do you understand by cybersecurity automation?
Security automation is basically machine-based execution of security operations with the ability to programmatically identify, examine and remediate all threats with or without human intervention by identifying incoming threats, triaging and prioritizing alerts as they emerge, then responding to them in a timely fashion.
Security automation takes care of the majority of the work for your security team, so they don’t have to dig through and manually respond to each alarm as it arrives. Security automation can, among other things:
Identify risks in your environment.
Determine whether or not to take action as a result of the situation.
Keep the problem under control and find a solution.
Triage potential threats by following security analysts’ methods, instructions, and decision-making workflow to evaluate the incident and evaluate whether it’s a genuine problem.
Why is security automation important?
According to a University of Maryland research, cyberattacks occur every 39 seconds, and businesses receive thousands, if not millions, of alerts each month. Security personnel is now responsible for monitoring a significantly bigger attack surface than in previous years, which includes mobile devices, cloud infrastructure, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.
In short, they are bombarded with alerts from all sides.
What are signs that an organization needs security automation?
A breach, slow reaction times, an abundance of false positives, and a desire for more efficient and cost-effective operations are all signals that your organization needs security automation.
While most businesses could benefit from security automation, they are more likely to demand or embrace it if they:
In case a breach has occurred:
Data breaches have impacted billions of people and numerous businesses. Breach costs averaged $148 per lost or stolen record in 2018, totaling nearly $4 million per occurrence. When it comes to security, businesses cannot afford to be sloppy.
Incident response times are lagging:
Considering security analysts can only investigate a small percentage of the signals received, responding in real-time is unlikely. Organizations require solutions and strategies that enable them to resolve events faster and spend less time per occurrence.
False positives are overwhelming the security team.
False positives are only revealed as such after they have been thoroughly analyzed as a true threat. These occurrences divert security analysts’ attention away from more serious concerns.
Security teams aspire to be more productive, efficient, and cost-effective.
Security analysts aren’t maximizing their worth to the organization if they waste time on repeated duties and false positives.
How can automation be implemented safely and effectively?
To ensure that you’re employing security automation to its full potential, you must first ensure that you’ve thoroughly assessed your security processes. You must determine which aspects of your security operations generate the most alerts, which types of alerts consume the most time from your analysts, and which replies analysts respond to in a predictable manner.
The automatic replies are altered in such a way that they learn from experience, and the actions made by SecOps and Analysts and integrate replies based on those experiences over time. This is why it is best to examine your security operations first and then decide how much automation you want to utilize in your security operations.
What Are The Advantages Of Automation?
Automation isn’t merely a trend or a technological buzzword. It is being used by both large and small businesses. The cybersecurity team can focus on more sophisticated activities by incorporating automation in an organization’s environment. This means cybersecurity team members can focus on more vital, creative, and technical work to resolve issues and improve the organization’s risk posture while the machine handles the tedious, repeated tasks. Once the necessary tasks have been automated, cybersecurity professionals can concentrate on projects such as:
Engineering and Architecture: Automation will free up the cybersecurity team to focus on developing and implementing cybersecurity strategies, such as zero-trust and enterprise-wide cyber hygiene.
Remediation Activities: Your automated efforts will aid your technical and mission teams by giving more repeatable and actionable insight into the enterprise environment, resulting in fewer vulnerabilities.
Automation Development and Engineering: Automation will become a critical component of the cybersecurity program, necessitating its own set of resources for continuous and iterative automation design and execution.
Conclusion
In cybersecurity, automation does not always imply the removal of human inputs and functions. It is not a zero-sum game in which gain for one party results in a loss for the other, eventually resulting in the elimination of one of the parties. What’s obvious is that automation aids humans in meeting the expanding demands of security testing as software systems and environments become more sophisticated, as well as the overwhelming sophistication and volume of cyberattacks.
Edward Lewis is a creative person who has been writing blogs and articles about cybersecurity. He writes about the latest updates regarding mcafee.com/activate and how it can improve the work experience of users. His articles have been published in many popular e-magazines, blogs, and websites.
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