Getting started with security automation requires you to establish your requirements, define use cases, and thoroughly research providers. And if you’re ready, here are a few ways how you can move forward with the big decision about which security automation solution to adopt.

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.

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There are numerous ways to generate value from security automation, which include establishing priorities for its use, developing playbooks and training staff. Follow these best practices to gain the most value from your security automation investment:

For example, retailers are dealing with ransomware and phishing attacks at unprecedented levels. Automation can help clear the deck of repetitive attacks and false positives, so security analysts can investigate those cases more deeply and establish long-term safeguards.

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Today, providers offer security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) systems, which automate both responses and their coordination across a complex infrastructure — reducing, or even in some cases eliminating, the potential for human error. (Note that vendors use varying and inconsistent terminology to describe their tools, so make sure you’re clear on what features you require from a security automation platform before you begin researching vendors.)

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.

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 allows you to drastically reduce your incident investigation and response times and stay ahead of threats. Tasks that could take hours — or even days — can be reduced to mere seconds. That means you’ll be able to faster address threats and better protect your customers, while safeguarding your business’s reputation and bottom line.

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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.

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.

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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.

Detection as code Sentinel

Security automation is the process of automatically detecting, investigating and remediating cyberthreats — 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.

Standardized workflows: Based on a playbook, the security automation solution will know what actions to take in a particular scenario and will do so consistently every time, ensuring a repeatable and auditable process. Standardized actions might include:

Detection-as-Code pipeline

Before you consider vendors, work with your IT team and other leaders in the organization to pinpoint the problems you need to solve. Here are a few questions that can drive the conversation:

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.

Stephen Watts works in growth marketing at Splunk. Stephen holds a degree in Philosophy from Auburn University and is an MSIS candidate at UC Denver. He contributes to a variety of publications including CIO.com, Search Engine Journal, ITSM.Tools, IT Chronicles, DZone, and CompTIA.

Detection as Code Elastic

The primary purpose of security automation is to make security operations more efficient and effective. Security orchestration is designed to connect all of your security tools and make sure they work together, share information and respond to security alerts and incidents in concert, even if the data necessary to power that cooperation is spread across your environment in multiple systems and tools.

The terms security automation and security orchestration are often used interchangeably, and while they have much in common, they are significantly different. Security automation, as we have explored in this article, is designed to automate specific security tasks. Security orchestration is designed to unite the various automated processes and tools and make them work effectively together.

Security automation is no longer a “nice to have.” It’s a must in today’s complex environments. Amid the rising number and severity of potential threats and cyber attacks, there’s a shortage of top-flight security talent. Automation maximizes the job satisfaction and engagement of your best security analysts by automating mundane, repetitive tasks.

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Security automation evolved as a hot topic for organizations and security teams thanks in large part to the exponential rise of cyberattacks. The overwhelming number of threats demanded automated incident response to more rapidly identify and respond to a cyberattack or security breach.

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Research providers. Armed with your goals, priorities, and use cases, you can begin looking for a vendor. Some things to keep in mind to help you whittle down your options:

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Establish your needs first. How security automation can help you, what tools you will adopt and processes you establish would be dependent on the cyber risk profile of not only your organization, but also the industry it operates in, whether it is retail, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, the public sector or another industry.

Define use cases. Based on your industry and organizational goals, establish a list of ways you will use security automation. Spend some time on this step, because it will be critical for researching vendors that can meet your business needs and eventually for creating playbooks.

Seamless integration with other security systems: Security automation products integrate with your other security assets — including firewalls, endpoint products, reputation management services, sandboxes, directory services, ticketing systems and security incident and event management (SIEM) — to orchestrate actions that span multiple attack vectors and require the involvement of numerous security tools.

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.

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A security automation solution is a unified software solution that can handle the security needs across your entire organization in a holistic manner. Some of the capabilities of a security automation platform include:

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.

While automated incident response helped with security issues, a more proactive approach was ultimately needed. That in turn grew into security automation and orchestration, the latter enabling connectivity between security tools and workflows.

Security automation performs these activities automatically and instantaneously — faster than even the most experienced human analyst would be able to do so.

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.