What it is, why we need it, and how it’s evolving to help security operations teams.
Automation is meant to make our lives easier. Self-driving cars help us drive safer. Automated checkout at the store makes grocery trips faster. But what about security automation?
It seems counterintuitive to make security automation simpler – shouldn’t cybersecurity be sophisticated and complex?
Just as automation doesn’t remove the need for people, automation doesn’t remove sophistication from your security operations center. The goal of security automation is to take a powerful, complex security ecosystem and make it simple to use by whole teams.
What is Security Automation?
Security automation is designed to automatically execute security best practices, defined by your SecOps team, at machine speeds. This allows you to standardize your processes to mitigate risk, speed resolution, and streamline communications.
Security Automation platforms adapt to your organization’s unique security requirements and operational processes to automate tasks that are typically time-consuming and require constant monitoring of third-party systems. This significantly speeds up the incident response process, improving your organization’s ability to respond to more incidents in less time without adding unnecessary overhead.
Why Do We Need It?
One of the biggest challenges security teams face is disparate technologies. When thousands of alerts fire from multiple tools that have little communication with each other, analysts are quickly overwhelmed with too much data.
Security automation gathers these disjointed tools into a single place. Connections are created and automated workflows help build out business processes quickly. When you introduce automation into your security operations center (SOC), you reduce the number of steps your team has to take to accomplish tasks.
Building Robust Automation Isn’t Always Easy at First
In reality, most automation isn’t ‘set it and forget it'. Legacy security automation platforms come with their own limitations and problems like a high barrier to entry, complex workflows, overwhelming processes, and too many steps.
It’s common for CISOs to want automation for their list of perks, but then quickly realize they don’t have the staff to get started. Building use cases takes expertise and time with complex automation platforms, which also need to be regularly maintained to function properly. Countless steps and moving pieces lead to decision fatigue when creating workflows.
Security teams deserve a simple way to start small with automation and then grow at a pace that supports their process. Most teams can’t dive into the deep end with security automation – you need to take baby steps.
No-Code, Low-Code, Full-Code?
Security automation can be broken down into three main categories: no-code, low-code, and full-code (think traditional SOAR platforms). Each comes with its own degree of flexibility and requirements.
No-code automation offers codeless access to the basics of security automation. However, you’re limited to pre-made use cases and workflows, which leaves minimal customization in the future.
Full-code automation requires dedicated coding experts to create workflows and processes, but you have more full customization options. The barrier to entry is high, though, and requires significantly more time to fully operate.
What is Low-Code Security Automation?
Low-Code security automation is the sweet spot between no-code and full-code. You can still expect robust application development capabilities for a range of customizable use cases, but with more user-friendly features like drag-and-drop data entry and built-in business logic. With low-code automation, you essentially gain the ability to operate at any level of coding you prefer – do you want no-code, some-code, or more-code? The choice is yours.
Learn more about low-code vs. no-code security automation.
The Next Generation of Automation
Low-code is the future of security automation. SecOps teams need more visibility, more power, and more data ingestion to succeed. At the same time, automation platforms need to be simple and flexible enough for small security teams to benefit from. There are three main areas that SecOps teams need help in, where low-code automation can help.
Gain True Visibility
Low-code security automation enables visibility and actionability at scale, without making things complicated. Visibility across all tools, both inside and outside the SOC, is possible.
Streamline Data Ingestion
Bring in larger and broader data sets at machine speeds. The closer detection can get to the source of alerts, the faster threats can be stopped.
Simplify Playbook Building
Robust case management capabilities allow you to quickly build playbooks that respond in real-time. Best practices and business logic are built in to avoid errors and save analysts time.
As platforms continue to evolve, low-code security automation stands out for its simplicity and sophistication. With low-code, teams can build automation platforms that adapt to their unique needs – not the other way around. Learn what security automation can do and how it can help take your team with Low-Code Security Automation 101.
Source of original content: https://swimlane.com/blog/low-code-security-automation-simplicity/
Website: https://swimlane.com/
