Cybersecurity Automation: How Automation Trends Solve The Complexity Of Cybersecurity?

As the new-age technologies have disrupted the IT industry, several trending topics grab the attention regularly. The automation of mundane and repetitive tasks has become an essential dose for progressive companies. It releases the workforce from such task and directs them towards more creative work. The focus can be more onto innovation and leadership quality from a cybersecurity standpoint. As the automation may bring a lot of complexity with itself, cybersecurity programs should be ready at the forefront for automated solutions thus giving rise to another innovative approach of Cybersecurity Automation.

Deciphering Cybersecurity Automation 

The new automation practices generally refer to tools like SOAR (Security Automation and Orchestration) products, RPA and custom-developed software code that automate the process and also performs the analysis.

SOAR products are purpose-built tools that instruments activities between other security tools. It also performs specific automation activities in response to discover risks.

RPA tools are a broader set of automation tools that enable a wide variety of processes to be automated. Such tools are significantly adopted in the HR and finance sector. It can also be leveraged by cybersecurity teams.

Custom-developed software and code are capable of automating all kind of analyses. It is often leveraged for a niche or certain challenge within an organization lacking an out of the box tool availability.

All three approaches interact with an enterprise's orchestration to gather intelligence, perform analysis and take-automated action or prompt a team member to take further action.

Need for Cybersecurity Automation

If cybersecurity cannot manage the changing ecosystem sufficiently, the new-found love for digital transformation can result in increasing organizational complexity leading to certain risks.

Several companies inspect systems and data manually to gather evidence of unexpected behavior and detect indicators of compromise or defect. Such losing proposition in new-age companies can be addressed by cybersecurity automation. It can also assist and address poorly proportioned cybersecurity teams. As it is quite unrealistic to expect humans to catch potential cybersecurity events reliably thus leveraging automation could be significant to reliably protect the organization.

Perks Of Cybersecurity Automation

•  Through its implementation, the cybersecurity team in an organization can focus on more complex activities implying that machines can perform repetitive tasks and cybersecurity teams can dedicate themselves to more critically creative technical work to resolve issues & organizational risk posture.

•  It will enable the cybersecurity team to focus on designing and implementing cybersecurity strategies.

•  The identified deficiencies from some automation efforts will support the technical and mission teams while providing more repeatable and actionable insight across the organization.

•  Automation will become a vital part of the cybersecurity program which would require its resources related to ongoing and iterative automation design and implementation.

Basic Approaches Of Success Implementation Of Automation Concepts

•  The cybersecurity team should be embedded with development capabilities enabling developers to report directly to cyber leadership.

•  The partnership of cybersecurity with organizational development teams will enable cybersecurity to enforce the capabilities of experts of such teams.

•  Adopt a hybrid approach which would utilize an internal team for tactical development work and organizational development capabilities for complicated integration works.

With the continuous increase in cybersecurity complexity, the need for security automation tools and techniques will continue to grow. Shortly, it will become an integral part of an organization's cybersecurity prospective roadmap.

Future of Cybersecurity Automation

So far, we can see the future of cybersecurity is closely knitted with automation. Though in future cybersecurity teams are more likely to become smarter in terms of codes and development practices. We can also expect that the cybersecurity program may turn into developer shop nurturing automation capabilities that will be created and advanced through multiple techniques.