What is security automation?

What are the benefits of security automation?

Because of its advantages across business activities, security automation is a core element of IT security policy. Benefits include the following:

• Reduced human workload. Automation reduces the human requirement to continuously execute menial IT security tasks, potentially minimizing alert fatigue in humans.
• Increased resource availability. With human toil reduced, the security staff's focus moves to more complex tasks and strategies.
• Decreased human error. When alerts flood security operations centers, overwhelmed employees sometimes miss important data or initiate an improper response. Security automation reduces those types of errors and omissions.
• More reliable processing capabilities. Automation bolsters accuracy since its processes, unlike manual actions, are repeatable and deterministic.
• Faster risk identification. Automated workflows recognize and analyze risk efficiently -- more quickly than human security workflows.
• Accelerated threat response. Again, when configured for response, security automation directly remediates an issue far faster than a manual process.
• Improved compliance. Automated security processes help verify that current security policies and their applications meet regulatory compliance requirements.
• Mitigated risk. Security automation includes regular scanning and required patches for known risks. These repeated tasks reduce exploitation exposure and the chances of a data breach.

Common use cases for security automation

Across domains and deployment environments, security teams face time-sensitive operational challenges, both on-premises and in the cloud. Security automation proves useful in many areas, including:

Vulnerability management

Known vulnerabilities are common attack vectors. Security automation scans for vulnerabilities, prioritizes the most dangerous and provides automated patch management across hardware and software assets.

Threat detection

Threats include cyberattacks in any form, including unauthorized access, data exfiltration and prompt injection. Properly set up, security automation continuously scans for these and other threats.

Incident response

Following threat detection, remediation reduces the total effect as quickly as possible. Security automation executes incident response playbooks that define specific, repeatable and immediate countermeasures.

Data security

Security automation is commonly used for automated data classification, the identification of sensitive and personally identifiable information, and the assurance of proper data encryption.

Compliance management

Security automation tools monitor and maintain compliance with various rules and laws, including the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

How to employ security automation

Security automation is a multistep process that begins with understanding the problem and its scope. Security automation typically features the following steps:

1. Inventory current processes. Document and inventory all existing manual security processes and tasks in the organization's workflow.

2. Define objectives. Not every task needs automation. Defining the goals and objectives of any security automation exercise often identifies the most impactful places to begin, from improving compliance reports to reducing the mean time to repair or resolve security incidents.

3. Obtain organizational buy-in. Successful security automation efforts must involve security staff, including SOC analysts and IT staff, as an integral part of the process.

4. Choose the right tools. Using the organization's current processes and established objectives, the next step is to evaluate different security automation tools, ensuring that any choice integrates smoothly with existing processes and technologies.

5. Write playbooks. Document the organization's common security workflows in a playbook. Include responses to different types of common incident response scenarios, such as ransomware or phishing attacks.

6. Deploy and test. With the appropriate tools and playbooks in place, next is an initial deployment and test of different scenarios to evaluate efficacy.

7. Monitor and refine. Security automation processes require regular review to ensure continued effectiveness. Security teams must also update and refine processes and technologies as organizational objectives change in response to emerging threats.

Pitfalls and challenges of security automation

Despite the measurable benefits security automation provides, organizations must be aware of its pitfalls and challenges, which include the following:

• Integration. Establishing effective security automation across different tools and processes from varied sources is a challenge.
• Complexity. Automating security processes requires a major investment of both time and resources to set up and operate properly.
• Accuracy. Any security process carries a risk of false positives or false negatives. Security automation's accuracy failures may stem from misconfigurations or shortcomings in the underlying technologies.
• Automation tool security. Security automation tools carry risks. They must be properly secured against unauthorized use and attack.
• Institutional knowledge gap. While humans -- and their work -- can sometimes be a bottleneck, their skills and institutional knowledge are not encoded into security automation. An overreliance on automation sidelines human oversight, which remains a useful security component.

Security automation best practices

Following is a list of practices to consider when deploying security automation:

• Keep humans in the loop. Reducing manual work is an important benefit of security automation, but humans are still needed. Human oversight detects errors and discrepancies that automation may miss.
• Deploy automation in phases. Take a phased approach to ramping up and deploying security automation. Don't start with a full incident response. Rather, begin with lower risk operations such as quarantining suspicious emails.
• Focus on interoperability. Security automation's difficult task is connecting different systems together. By focusing on interoperability, with communication tools featuring open application programming interfaces (APIs), organizations can minimize that challenge.
• Integrate threat intelligence. Threat intelligence brings depth and breadth to any security automation workflow. The absorbed intelligence underpins the process in making an informed decision.
• Monitor and adjust. Security automation, despite its name, is not a set-it-and-forget-it technology. Humans must regularly monitor results to ensure operations meet expected outcomes. Systems, circumstances and risks change over time, requiring regular organizational adjustments.

How can security automation fit into an SOC?

A security operations center manages and defends an organization's IT security, and security automation brings processing advantages to an SOC in multiple areas, such as the following:

• Threat detection. Rather than manually scanning and sorting results to identify risks, security automation reduces the time needed to surface the most impactful issues.
• Incident response. Automated incident response playbooks accelerate the time needed for an SOC to remediate issues. Automated playbooks lock down risky devices and users, blocking or revoking access.
• Patch management. SOC staff members routinely maintain and update IT systems. Automated patch management across different endpoints and server systems aids SOC teams in this responsibility.
• Compliance management. Automated security reporting technology aids SOC teams in maintaining regulatory compliance, as well as generating reports that document compliance.

Security automation tools

Modern security systems must integrate automation tools and platforms to provide comprehensive protection. While some tools focus on a specific area, there is overlap among categories. They include:

Extended detection and response

Extended detection and response (XDR) platforms collect different telemetry from endpoints and network devices, delivering automated threat detection and endpoint protection capabilities. XDR automates threat correlations across different devices and provides automated policy enforcement.

Security information and event management

Security information and event management (SIEM) systems help organizations to ingest logs and automate log analysis across a distributed computing infrastructure. The automated analysis often includes machine learning (ML) technology to autonomously identify and prioritize risks. SIEMs are also often used to help audit compliance reporting because they continuously monitor logs.

Security orchestration, automation and response

Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms extend the capabilities of SIEM, enabling multiple systems to coordinate an automatic response to threats. SOAR also automates alert triage across different systems, including firewalls, to determine what is and isn't a threat. The system then executes an incident response playbook, which can also span multiple systems, to remediate the issue and improve overall security posture.

Learn what differentiates SOAR from SIEM.

Vulnerability management

Increasingly included in security automation workflows, vulnerability management tools provide continuous scanning across infrastructure and endpoints to identify services and software that require a patch. The system automatically applies a risk score to unpatched assets and coordinates patch deployment.

Cloud-native application protection platform

Cloud-native application protection platform technology integrates cloud security posture management and cloud workload protection platform capabilities into a single system, providing automated configuration and vulnerability monitoring across cloud environments.

Security automation vs. security orchestration

Security automation and security orchestration are closely related concepts. In many respects, security orchestration is a superset of security automation capabilities, delivering automation across several tools instead of only one.

The chart below outlines key differences between security automation and security orchestration:

What is the future of security automation?

Security automation largely began with rules-based responses: When a certain threshold or event occurred, automation triggered another action.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and ML are changing all aspects of IT and already impacting security automation, moving the process beyond a rules-based approach to improve the speed and accuracy of risk analysis.

With AI/ML-powered predictive analytics, security automation promises not only identification and response to risks, but anticipation and prediction of potential threats.