What is Security Automation: A Brief Primer

 As recent cyberattacks against companies and governments have demonstrated, no organization is safe from cybercrime. Moreover, security incidents and data breaches are becoming expensive, costing a staggering $3.86 million on average. It is clear that prevention is, now more than ever, a necessary focus.
To prevent malicious attacks, enterprises need strong cybersecurity programs with constant vigilance, threat detection, and remediation. However, these objectives are difficult to achieve with a strictly human-based approach. This is due to the prevalent problem of alert fatigue, a combination of sheer volume (large amounts of data) and wasted time (mostly in the form of large amounts of false positives). Security automation can help minimize this problem, strengthening an organization’s security posture while also aiding the security team’s day-to-day responsibilities. Here’s how.

Enhanced security capabilities

With security automation, the organization’s Security Operations Center (SOC) can reduce false-positive alerts, reduce MTTR, and increase MTBF. They can also conduct deeper analyses and implement more proactive security measures, strengthening the organization’s capability to withstand threats.

Optimized security budget and higher ROI

Security automation empowers security teams to move away from routine detection and response tasks, and focus on more value-added work (like advanced threat defense).

Fewer errors for stronger threat detection and incident response

Intelligent security automation “learns” from patterns, and standardizes threat detection and incident response. This allows for better protection, minimizes errors, and improves the accuracy of alert investigations.
In addition, security automation tools can also:

• Determine legitimate alerts for deeper investigation
• Triage and mitigate potential risks by following the organization’s decision-making workflow
• Standardize incident response processes to reduce response times
• Streamline communications between security and other teams
• Increase visibility of security metrics for a stronger cybersecurity posture

 Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR) combines automated data gathering, case management, analytics, and security automation, so organizations can easily implement more sophisticated defense-in-depth capabilities to protect themselves. While security automation is about replacing manual incident response tasks with automation, security orchestration is about integrating disparate security tools and platforms to enable automated, machine-speed decision-making. It centralizes security operations data from different sources into a single interface, so security teams can quickly understand the threat landscape and respond appropriately. 
What that means is the threat is placed within the overall context of the network and organization. It is difficult to make an informed decision without information, and Orchestration helps provide that information.

To get the most value out of security automation, it’s important to first establish security needs and objectives, define relevant use cases, study other security automation examples, and research providers.

Establish security objectives

In addition to improving their threat detection and remediation capability, organizations may also have other specific security goals: reduce alert fatigue, minimize inefficiencies, make operations leaner, etc. It’s important to identify these goals before implementing a security automation system.

Define use cases and examples 

The enterprise lists the ways they will use security automation. It helps to review other security automation examples for inspiration and information.

Research providers

While researching providers, it’s useful to ask these questions:

• Is their platform “no-code” for easy deployment and use?
• Is it customizable and scalable?
• Does it provide third-party integrations and plugins?
• Can they provide security automation examples from previous deployments?
• Is staff training required?
• Is technical support available?

The best security automation systems offer:

• Standardized incident response workflows
• Pre-built and customizable playbooks based on internal rules 
• Integration with other security systems, like SIEMs, firewalls, and endpoint solutions