Threat Intelligence • July 14, 2022
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.
Security automation replaces manual incident response processes, such as scanning, detection, investigation and remediation, allowing SecOps teams to respond more efficiently to threats. A security automation tool minimizes the need for human intervention to identify incoming threats and prioritize alerts. It instantly engages with an incident, quickly responds to alerts, and contains and resolves issues.
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.
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).
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:
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.
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.
The enterprise lists the ways they will use security automation. It helps to review other security automation examples for inspiration and information.
While researching providers, it’s useful to ask these questions:
The best security automation systems offer:
Security teams, who are already understaffed, are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of security alerts, dozens of tools to manage, and false positives. In addition, they end up wasting time on repetitive tasks. As a result, many alerts slip through the cracks, leaving the organization prone to security breaches.
A developing business requires more complex infrastructures and technology stacks that are constantly evolving in unexpected ways. With automation, organizations can eliminate much of the manual, administrative work from compliance activities and scale its activities and resources to meet growing compliance needs. Compliance can expand with the company without risking the security of protected information assets.
Since security analysts can only investigate a small portion of the alerts that arrive, it is difficult if and very rare for them to respond in real time. The incident response time lags as a result. Automation tools and solutions enable security teams to resolve incidents more quickly, reducing the total time spent per incident.
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