Modern cyber-attacks launched against businesses today are automated, rather than performed by humans. As organisations try to manually defend against these attacks, they’re fighting a losing battle.
To be successful in protecting against automated cyber-attacks, it’s essential to use the same tools as malicious actors, using automated cybersecurity tools. Automated security isn’t limited in the way humans are and reduces the time and effort it takes to detect and prevent cyber-attacks.
In the last twelve months, businesses have seen a big jump in the number of disruptive attacks, encouraging organisations to focus on updating cybersecurity is critical. The average cost of a security data breach has reached an all time high of $4.24 million per incident. The factor that made the biggest difference to the total cost of a data breach was cybersecurity automation.
This article looks at the future of cybersecurity automation technology for business.
What is cybersecurity automation?
Automation of cybersecurity is the use of different technologies that detect, investigate, and remediate cyber threats without human intervention. Cybersecurity automation means staff don’t have to manually go through each threat alert as it comes in to determine which are real and need attention. Security automation can:
- Detect threats in the business IT environment
- Triage potential threats to investigate and decide if it is a real event
- Determine if action is needed in response
- Contain and resolve the threat.
All these actions happen in seconds, without needing any human involvement. Automating the process of repetitive workflows and tasks means staff can focus time and resources on more value adding work, enhancing threat intelligence.
With the help of automated security software and devices, security teams can successfully deal with data alerts to find all the obscure threats they need to be aware of.
For example, security monitoring systems automatically search for intruding threats and alert security teams of obscure threats. Automation tools detect whether a user should be accessing a network or system, automate a response and send an alert to the security operations centre.
What are the benefits of cybersecurity automation?
Cybersecurity is one of the most important global topics today. With the growing number of cyberattacks, it’s no surprise there are increased security solutions being offered to help businesses keep their data safe.
Cybersecurity automation is one of those solutions, and the benefits include:
- Efficiency – automation speeds up the collection of data, allowing for faster incident response. It makes responses more dynamic and uniform, so security teams can work more efficiently and be allocated where they’re most needed
- Cost effective – fewer human hours being used for repetitive security tasks increases the efficiency of security teams to focus on designing and creating other security strategies.
- Fewer mistakes – artificial intelligence and machine learning increases the analytic capabilities of vast amounts of threat data, which happens faster and with more accuracy than is possible if done by humans.
- Remediation is optimised – automation more easily finds deficiencies within the business environment that can be corrected, increasing security further.
Automation increases efficiency
Data is a critical part of cyber protection, but the vast amount collected must be organised into actionable steps. It’s of no value to have threat data from security technology if it can’t be acted on and the sheer scale of data means it’s out of the scope of human ability to do quickly enough to act against threats.
Cybersecurity automation organises all this data to decipher threats and the actionable steps needed to meet them. This is where it’s important to choose automation software that collects data from internal security systems and can connect with available global threat intelligence data.
Automation predicts security needs
When the security system is automated, if a threat is detected and identified, it can employ a protective measure over business systems immediately. This type of technology is very intuitive, as it can predict which areas of a system are vulnerable and can be targeted by cyber attackers, then predict and prevent the attack. Data can be analysed to determine if threats are coming from infections within the business environment or externally.
As threats are identified, protections need to be created and deployed to prevent the attack spreading through networks, cloud, or devices. Ideally this is not the attack entry point but the next predicted step in the attack. Cybersecurity automation does this much faster than manually creating the parameters needed for different technologies and vendors, as well as expecting the future behaviour of the attacker.
Automation frees up resources
Over half of businesses in Asia-Pacific aren’t sure their cybersecurity is good enough to combat attacks. Many are constrained by budget cuts and staff shortages, despite being aware there is a critical need to focus on improving their organisation’s security risk profile.
Automation makes it possible for security operations centres to automate many time-consuming and repetitive tasks and ensures that operations run smoothly without the need for human assistance. This allows security teams to deal with potential alerts faster and more effectively, but also concentrate on proactively working to improve the risk posture of the organisation.
Cybersecurity uses different technologies to protect systems, networks, devices, and data from cyberattacks. Cybercrime is increasing rapidly globally and it’s becoming incumbent on organisations to invest heavily in cyber protection. As the threat landscape increases, the time and resources needed for cybersecurity become more consuming.
Is cybersecurity automation the future?
As cyber-attacks increase and become more sophisticated, automation is going to become even more critical in detecting and mitigating threats. Automating repetitive workflows bolsters threat detection and improves protection. Security teams can therefore focus on more proactive and efficient strategies for the business environment.
Companies that care about how their data, devices and users are protected will have to continue investing in automated tools to keep up with the growing complexity of the security landscape.
To find out how automation can be utilised as part of your organisation’s cybersecurity strategy, get in touch with the team of experts at INTELLIWORX today.
