Security Automation: a Beginner’s Guide

Security automation refers to machine-actions that monitor, detect, troubleshoot and remediate cyberthreats without human interaction. Security automation identifies threats, prioritizing the best actions to remediate them as they occur. This helps security teams remain focused on big-ticket security items as they don’t have to solve each small remediation that would normally get escalated to security.

Automating security results in best practices for performing threat detection, systematically triaging identified threats, determining the next steps and resolving issues in a matter of seconds. It’s no wonder more and more often, enterprise businesses that have undergone digital transformation are looking to automated security as an asset for their organization.

Using security automation, risk analysts can focus on proactively identifying security problems instead of remediating existing tickets. This allows these professionals to use their skills in a way that adds more value to the organization. In this article, we’ll talk about the history of security automation, why it’s important and then offer tips for implementing automated security protocols in your organization.

The Origin of Security Automation

The discussion about automating security was a direct result of the increase in cyberthreats and attacks facing businesses. Before the rise of security automation, risk analysts were responsible for identifying and resolving as many threats as possible. Unfortunately, that meant the vast majority of minor threats went ignored because capturing and remediating all threats was an endless task. Security automation was a necessary response to the overwhelm that analysts were experiencing.

The first iteration of security automation was an automated incident response that helped make security queues more manageable and easier to service. Then came a more holistic approach to security automation that was sophisticated enough to find and resolve security issues without being prompted by analyst interaction. Today, another market has arisen from security automation called Security, Orchestration Automation and Response, or SOAR.

The Difference Between Orchestration and Automation

Security automation integrates machine-operated tasks that simplify essential processes for risk and security analysts. Orchestration takes security automation a step further, ensuring vital systems are carefully and securely integrated together to provide a full range of automated security and feedback tasks. Orchestration ensures that all parts of your security and threat detection infrastructure are able to work together, offering proactive threat protection and remediation to an entire architecture.

Automation is a component of orchestration, and orchestration is an evolution of security automation. There are almost a limitless number of IT tasks that can be automated. Security is among them. Doing so removes time-intensive aspects of security from the analyst, leaving them able to handle other issues while making proactive observations for security optimization. The goal of orchestration is to provide full-coverage management of the security of a large-scale infrastructure.