Signs You Need to Expand Your Security Automation Capabilities

The influx of security alerts and vulnerabilities in today’s environment finds many organizations stretched thin, trying to monitor and respond. Most have some level of security automation running within their environment. It’s a powerful solution to enhance speed, accuracy, and scale, but how can you tell when it’s time to step up your automation game? Here are a few key indicators that it is time to implement more robust capabilities.

Your Security Team is Overwhelmed by Alert Fatigue

One of the most telling signs that more security automation is needed is when your team continues to be inundated with alerts. As team members face “alert fatigue,” they are so overwhelmed by the volume that they can overlook or ignore critical threats. If your team is still struggling with a high level of fatigue, then your processes need to be examined. Effective security automation tools streamline and prioritize alerts, automatically handling low-level tasks so that your security team can focus on the bigger issues.

Incident Response Takes Too Long

Taking days—or even more than mere minutes—to respond to a security incident puts your organization at greater risk. Delays in incident response gives attackers more time to exploit vulnerabilities. Robust security automation accelerates incident response by automating threat containment, remediation, and reporting. If incident response times for an alert is more than several minutes, further evaluation of your business processes and automations for bottlenecks is a must.

Manual Processes Drain Your Resources

Even if they have some automation in place, some organizations continue to rely on manual, repetitive security processes for triaging alerts, many times conducting duplicative investigations. These manual processes are time-consuming, error-prone, and resource-intensive. Many security processes are fairly simple to automate. By automating repetitive tasks, your security team can reclaim more time to focus on providing business value and addressing complex security issues.

You’re Facing Compliance or Audit Challenges

Heavily regulated industries, such as the federal government, healthcare or finance, continues to be challenging for organizations to maintain compliance. Regulatory frameworks require strict security protocols, detailed documentation, and evidence of compliance and consistent processes. If you are not already using security automation for compliance, it’s time to start. Security automation streamlines compliance efforts by automatically generating reports, maintaining log files, and tracking incident response actions. This saves time and reduces costs while ensuring that you are audit ready.

You Cannot Hire Your Way Out of the Situation

Cybersecurity talent is scarce, and budgets are limited. The shortage of skilled cybersecurity professionals remains to be a problem. Automation helps bridge the gap for organizations struggling to hire and retain enough security experts within the allocated budget. Proper security automation reduces the need for additional hires and increases the existing team’s mean time to think (MTT), empowering them to focus on areas where human intelligence is most needed.

False Positives are Too Common

False positives are common in traditional security systems. They can drain resources, wasting time on investigations that lead nowhere. Automation tools with machine learning and AI can analyze historical data, identify patterns, and reduce the number of false positives by better distinguishing between real threats and benign activity. Effective security automation tools improve the quality and enrichment of the alerts being pushed to tier one, two, and three security analysts.

Your Organization Needs to Scale Rapidly

As businesses grow, so does their attack surface. New employees, locations, and cloud resources add complexity to security operations. Manually scaling security operations to match the pace of business growth is unsustainable and likely out of budget. Reinforcing security automation as a solution allows organizations to secure new assets and users without a proportional increase in staffing or budget.

Limited Transparency in Hybrid Environments

For many organizations, security is a complex web spanning on-premises infrastructure, multiple cloud environments, and remote endpoints. Productive security automation makes it easier to monitor, detect, and respond to threats consistently across any environment. This visibility and control are crucial for protecting an expanding and dispersed infrastructure.

Embracing Security Automation

Security automation is not just a convenience; it’s a necessity. And its use in your environment should be constantly evolving and expanding. By alleviating manual workloads, improving response times, and enhancing accuracy, security automation allows nearly all organizations to strengthen their defenses without overloading their teams. If your organization is facing any of the challenges above, now may be the time to consider advancing your security automation capabilities.

Contact us to learn how today.