Cybersecurity: The Orchestration and Automation of Processes

Within any sector, the automation of processes comes with technological, social and skill-gap orientated challenges, but cybersecurity really takes the cookie. The adoption of automation has certainly been widespread, with 95% of correspondents stating that they have automated some of their processes, but it always comes with challenges.

According to a report by ThreatQuotient, only 8% of correspondents had not encountered any problems when automating their cybersecurity processes. If cybersecurity automation is proving to be so flawed, why should organisations adopt it as a methodology?

Improving the Automation of Processes Within Cybersecurity

Within cybersecurity, the automation of processes provides technologies with a mind of their own, allowing them to intercept problems without having to rely on the variables that humans are usually compromised by. Beyond this, adversaries themselves often use automation as a way to hack into endpoints. In order to keep up with the pace of adversarial technologies and approaches, organisations are going to have to fight fire with fire. When you adjust your cybersecurity approach to include the automation of processes, cybersecurity technologies ramp up their speed in dealing with these issues. Becoming faster, and inevitably more furious, is ultimately the primary goal of threat interception.

How do senior-level professionals feel about cybersecurity automation?

While the vast majority of senior-level security professionals (77%) believe that automation is important, that same 23% are still struggling to see the benefits it would bring. This makes the automation of processes a rather difficult task for many entry-mid-level employees that have a stronger understanding of what will benefit their business. That said, the vast majority of experts who are automating have strategic reasons for doing so. 34% of correspondents, for instance, stating that automation was essential for improving or maintaining security standards while 31% implemented it to improve efficiency and productivity. 

In this episode of The Next Phase of Cybersecurity, Leon Ward, VP of Product Management at ThreatQuotient, walks us through the best way to overcome the technological challenges of implementing automation, the types of processes that are being automated in 2021 and why there is a lack of trust in STEM in the current digital landscape.