Security automation is the process of automatically detecting
Security automation is the process of automatically detecting
with or without human intervention — using a programmatic solution specifically designed for this purpose. Security automation works by identifying threats to an organization’s security posture, sorting and performing triage on them and setting a priority level, then responding to them in turn. Security automation is instrumental in helping streamline the multitude of alerts that security teams deal with on a daily basis.
In a modern security operations center (SOC), automation does a majority of the basic work assigned to security analysts, not only improving the speed and efficiency of threat detection, investigation and response, but also freeing the human operators from the responsibility to manually address alerts and giving them more time to focus on higher-level security tasks.
Some of the capabilities of security automation include:
Detecting threats to an organization’s environment
Enriching, correlating, grouping and prioritizing alerts to accelerate investigations
Applying predefined actions to contain and remediate issues
Current security automation software can perform all of these actions in seconds, often without requiring the intervention of the security team and removing them from repetitive, manual and time-consuming activities.
Automated systems also accelerate threat detection. Human operators are bombarded with security alerts, which can lead to what is known as “alert fatigue.” A recent study by IDC Research indicates that companies of all sizes are ignoring up to one-third of security alerts and are spending just as much time investigating false positives.
It’s easy to see why a solution that automatically removes false positives, enriches alerts with threat intelligence, groups numerous related alerts into a few incidents and prioritizes them according to the risk they pose to the organization can make a significant difference in identifying issues before they escalate. Automation can also help analysts avoid making errors by eliminating alert fatigue and helping security teams feel less overwhelmed — radically reducing manual processes.
In this article, we’ll talk about the basics of security automation, discuss its value for organizations of all types and sizes and explore how you can get started using a security automation platform.
security automation pie chart
Security teams ignore 74% of security alerts
Benefits of Security Automation
According to the Splunk State of Security 2022 Report, it takes a median of 14 hours to recover business-critical apps from downtime tied to a cybersecurity incident. With the cost of downtime averaging $200,000 per hour, the average annual cost of downtime is $33.6 million per organization. Meanwhile, according to Accenture’s report "State of Cybersecurity Resilience 2021" data breach costs are expected to increase from $3 trillion per year to more than $5 trillion in 2024.
Clearly, the longer it takes to detect, investigate and respond to a cyber attack, the higher its potential, including its ability to cause downtime. So, in today’s threat landscape, rapid identification and remediation of cyber threats is critical to minimizing the impact of an attack.
cyberattack happens every 39 seconds graphic
Cyberattacks happen every 39 seconds.
Before automated security processes came to the security operations center, it was the responsibility of human analysts to address all threats manually. This required thorough investigation of a multitude of alerts, enriching them with threat intelligence, and then determining what if any action should be taken to contain and remediate the threat. With the high volume of alerts that modern organizations receive, this degree of manual intervention is no longer possible.
Need a reminder on the difference between a SOC and a NOC
To compound the issue, many alerts turn out to be unrelated to a cyber threat or malicious activity, although they don’t necessarily appear that way upon initial examination. As a result, analysts spend precious time investigating false positives, increasing alert fatigue and keeping analysts from more important tasks.
Security automation performs these activities automatically and instantaneously — faster than even the most experienced human analyst would be able to do so.
With more time available, security analysts are able to pursue more rewarding and valuable strategic activities, including planning for growth, proactive threat hunting, and conducting more security analysis in greater depth. This is one of the ultimate benefits of security automation, both to the organization and to the security team.