This is Why You Should Automate Your Cybersecurity
"According to Bill Gates, "The first rule of any technology used in business is that automation applied to an efficiently managed operation will increase efficiency." While cybersecurity operations may not have been on his mind at the time, his thinking is truly applicable to today's cybersecurity operations centers (CSOCs).
DO YOU NEED TO AUTOMATE YOUR CYBERSECURITY OPERATIONS?
The answer is likely "yes," and whenever I ask anyone about automation, they unequivocally state that automation will undoubtedly enhance the overall cybersecurity foundation if implemented correctly in their organizations. They say "if" because the organizations I speak with, not many of them have actually implemented automation into their operations, even if they intend to do so. They usually reason that they are too busy to stop and learn how.
Here are some of the strongest reasons to automate...
We live in a world where launching cyber attacks on an organization is far cheaper than defending it. To make matters worse, the threat landscape is becoming increasingly difficult to cover. You face exponentially growing threats where adversaries are getting the upper hand every day while your security tools incessantly warn you.
Business resilience is the ultimate goal of any cybersecurity operation, and the only way to improve the overall resilience of your organization is to improve your overall efficiency in protecting it. The modern CSOC's role is, among other things, to translate resilience into strength across every function of the cybersecurity operational model and become more efficient in protecting, detecting, responding, and recovering from attacks. But it is easier said than done, especially when you are overwhelmed and lacking the internal automation knowledge to implement automation effectively.
THE EASIEST TASK TO ACHIEVE
Let us assume that both yourself and others know that there are some things that should be automated but have not yet been done. If that is the case, then that is the easiest task to achieve or resolve for yourself, and that is where you will see immediate success and quick ROI when you automate any of those processes.
Correlated Threat Data - Oh, the data! On a good day, you can handle it, but on a bad day, it controls you and never lets go. First, you need to collect threat data from various security tool silos, correlate it with global threat intelligence, and perform threat analysis on your data. If you try to do all of this manually, you will spend a lot of time and resources from your CSOC. Automating the correlation of data is a good place to start for quick success and invest all that spare time into value-added work.
Reacting and Responding to Threats - When you finally detect an intruder or threat, your entire team needs to react and respond faster than the threat can spread through your network, endpoints, devices, and servers. Mitigation is about working with different security products in your environment, at the same time creating protection across that environment, and trying to stay one step ahead of the attacker. Most of these workflows can be automated, thus speeding up your detection and intervention time when threats occur.
Breach Reporting and Notification - Efficiency will become important as new regulations demand greater transparency and emphasize shorter timeframes for breach notification, thus requiring faster understanding of various events. On average, it takes organizations 200 days to identify and report a breach. Automation is key to reducing analysis, reporting, and notification time to ensure compliance with regulations.
Start by defining your automation needs and identifying the easiest tasks to accomplish in your CSOC, and the best place to start is by automating security investigation elements, incident response, and remediation tasks. Automating data correlation and analysis using the outputs from multiple tools will save your team a lot of time when responding to alerts. Some CSOC teams take an intelligent approach to automation, incrementally adding automation in the areas that are most easily understood. The experiences and learning processes that the team goes through during this automation journey are a continuous stepping stone to further automation areas.
The threat landscape will forever grow in complexity, efficiency, and volume. If you do not automate at least some operations in your CSOC, the threats will get the better of you at some point. Automating cybersecurity operations is now, more than ever, a necessity rather than a luxury, and increasing it will dramatically enhance your efficiency
