Security Automation

Security Automation

The Promise of Zero-Touch Security

With the advent of technology and the Internet, more and more organizations are going online today. It brings with it convenience and ease of doing business, but it does have its demerits as well. Cyber security becomes a significant concern. As a solution to the severe issue, security automation is one excellent way to get substantial protection from cyber attacks and ensure the information security of the enterprise by leveraging the ‘zero-touch’ security principle.

The advancement in information technology has promoted the adoption of the Internet worldwide. The organizations today are witnessing a great digital transformation at the same time the cyber adversaries are using more and more sophisticated technologies to barge in to your organization’s network periphery. A data breach can cause loss of sensitive and confidential information resulting in loss of finances and reputation. Thus, it becomes imperative for enterprises to implement a holistic cyber security framework and leveraging security automation by adopting the ‘zero-touch’ security principle to keep cyber attacks at bay. Let’s understand it step by step.

What Is Zero Trust Security & How It Relates To ‘Zero-touch’ Security?

Zero Trust Security has become the hallmark of today’s digital world when it comes to enterprise information security. A zero-trust security model works on the principle of maintaining strict access controls and not trusting anyone, irrespective of their standing or reputation when considering ‘people’ aspects of the organization or when considering ‘technology’ aspect when you talk about networks, systems and applications. Zero-touch security in the digital world refers to a process in which enterprise devices can be automatically set up, configured, provisioned by an authorized user (generally an administrator), which eliminates or minimizes the need for further human or end-users manual interaction.

What Is Security Automation?

Security automation is the automated handling of security-oriented tasks. Therefore, no human intervention is there while carrying out security tasks like scanning for vulnerabilities and threats to prevent a cyberattack from taking place. Security automation also helps in avoiding the possibility of future attacks.

 

Security Automation And Its Importance

Security Automation is essential in organizations today because the Security Operations teams already come equipped with basics like Security Information and Event Management (SIEM), security logs, and endpoint security systems. Therefore, security automation helps in resolving issues like,

  • Shortage of qualified security talent
  • Alert fatigue
  • Delays in the resolution of issues
  • Inefficiencies in the operational fields

All the problems listed above can culminate in a data breach that could go unnoticed until it’s too late. Having security automation systems in place can reduce the response time to a security alert. It also enables the security operations team to determine the severity of the threats without the employees having to check multiple systems. It also helps the team to focus on the far more severe risks to ensure complete protection for the organization. Security automation becomes essential because of the myriad security challenges that confront organizations in this online age.

 The Security Challenges That Organisations Face Today

Organizations face various security-related challenges. Let’s discuss some of them:

  • Insider data breaches– Enterprises can install the highest quality of security features for their network to protect from external cyber attacks. However, an insider data breach by an unfaithful employee is enough to cause severe harm to the organization.
  • Supply chain weaknesses–In this era of automation, there exists a supply chain for almost every product or service in the industry. The supply chains bring in an external element and therefore introduce a security risk that hackers can exploit to gain access.
  • External breaches – Such breaches occur because of the inherent weakness in the network. Security operations teams can handle these vulnerabilities. External breaches will always remain one of the most current challenges for organizations.
  • Crime as a Service – Cyber criminals offer their services on the darknet to steal data or hold organizations to ransom. Cyber crime syndicates resort to the use of such CaaS packages to commit cyber crime.

Thus, enterprises need to adopt robust measures to tackle such challenges. Having a well-documented security system in place is one way of dealing with it. Another significant action is to choose zero-trust security.

Why Is Zero-Touch Security The Need Of The Hour Today?

We have seen how insider threats are as potent as external threats. Similarly, a vulnerable supply chain network can invite a lot of trouble. Security automation, with its zero-touch security features (no human intervention), ensures protection from cyber attacks that could lead to considerable losses. When you deal with automation, it entails that you do not bypass any security procedures at any stage. Organizations cannot afford to trust anyone when it comes to ensuring the security of the network. 

When you adopt a zero-trust security approach, you should have a trusted security partner handling these aspects.

The Role Of A Trusted Security Partner In Securing Your Organization’s Information Assets

Organizations should look for a whole range of services that use in-house tools and solutions, such as SIEM (Security Information and Event Management)and SOAR (Security Orchestration Automation and Response) solutions to ensure total security automation of the entire enterprise security operations.

Such service providers leverage market-leading SIEM and SOAR solutions, both on-premise and cloud-based, to deliver the most advanced features of market-leading tools. These companies leverage their tools, thereby providing security automation services based on specific customer requirements.

Zero-Touch Security Solutions And Automated Incident Response

One of the crucial aspects of zero-touch security is the excellent incident response facilities it offers. Managing a cyberattack is one aspect, whereas recovering from such an attack poses more significant challenges. An incident response mechanism in place should help limit the damage, thereby reducing the recovery time and the costs associated with it.

Any right zero-touch security solution should ensure to have a well-defined incident response mechanism to supplement the efforts of the security team. An automated incident response solution should be robust, as recovering from a cyber attack is of far greater importance than tackling it, especially in the case of ransomware attacks.

Future Trends In Advanced Security Solutions

Ransomware is going to be the modus operandi of the next generation of cyber criminals. It provides an easy way of acquiring the necessary information without risks. The security solutions of the future should be well equipped to handle cyber crimes like phishing, ransomware, etc. 

Security automation is the perfect riposte to such situations, as it does not provide any room for laxity because of its zero-trust approach. Such zero-touch security solutions are ideal for handling insider and external threats with equal felicity. The incidence response approach of these solutions is also of the top-drawer stuff.   

Final Words

We have seen the importance of security automation in today’s digital age. Online business and commerce are convenient, but they expose the network systems and make them vulnerable to cyber attacks. A robust security system should take care of these threats and ensure to protect the network from cyber attacks.

Security Automation

Augmenting Security Operations With Artificial Intelligence

Enterprises establish stringent security operations to respond to rising cases of cyber-attacks. Security threats, risks, and attackers are, however, increasing their damage potentials and in sophistication. As such, it is essential to enhance incident detection capabilities and response measures. Traditional operations inhibit organizations from achieving this due to factors like skill shortages and inadequate personnel, and reliance on manual processes that are no match to the highly advanced cyber threat actors.

Augmenting security operations means enhancing and strengthening their capabilities. Artificial intelligence technologies have been revolutionary in the cybersecurity industry and have been extensively applied in developing security products and processes. In fact, they have been used to address the talent and skill shortages, ineffective manual processes, and the insufficient traditional approaches that hamper incident detection and response. Here’s how:

  1. Blending data science and human expertise: This leverage machine learning tactics in detecting, reporting, and triaging security threats, effectively augmenting key functions associated with Tier-1 analysts.
  2. Automated detection: AI-enabled tools and products are designed to continuously collect and deeply analyze network traffic in real-time. Analyzing such data sources exposes suspicious behaviors and actions associated with attackers, thus revealing any hidden threats. The faster they are discovered, the sooner they can be mitigated, thus preventing attacks.
  3. Enhanced network visibility and coverage: Using AI to augment security operations increases network and system visibility, thus allowing round the clock monitoring. Extending the visibility to printers, desktops, laptops and IoT devices ensures end-point security, resulting in optimized cyber operations.

There are many other reasons for integrating AI in cybersecurity operations. It enhances security by automatically identifying an attack in different phases like; hidden communications such as command-and-control; lateral movement; internal reconnaissance; data exfiltration; abusing account credentials; and attacking campaigns, including mapping hosts and related attack indicators.

Security Automation

Maximizing Return On Existing Investment Through Automation

Technology has been transforming the world for decades.

Everything from the way we communicate, work and travel to how we connect with our environments has been changed by the introduction of technological networks.

On one side, this has made our lives better and more convenient, while on the other it has also allowed a far higher risk of security breaches and violations which are no longer preventable using traditional approaches to cyber safety.

Security Operations teams in organisations like yours across the globe have to perform numerous activities including analysis of alerts, external access validation, internal threat hunting, infrastructure monitoring, notification handling and more in order to ensure that each and every cyberthreat is detected and resolved with minimum damage.

But the problem is that this requires a lot of investments in infrastructure and resources, which can cause organisations to fall behind in the productivity due to shortage of resource availability in other departments that handle new services, products, client satisfaction and more; thus, affecting overall growth.

Whether you use analytically consistent machines for security tasks or expert human employees, there is always something or the other missing that leaves a room for error, causing data loss or other problems that can highly affect the reputation and functioning of the organisation.

This is why you need a better, smarter and more efficient solution to security compliance.

That solution is Automation and we can be your reliable automation partners!

This will help your SecOps teams to detect and triage suspicious activity,  secure firewall access, quickly investigate origins of firewall rule violations, manage black and white user lists, automatically validate threats, trigger remediations and create new enterprise firewall rules to blacklist the source of attacks among many other activities.

Our team will also monitor the working and ensure that everything is updated correctly without any faults or glitches.

This will help you automate repetitive tasks and focus on what is important and also you will have the ability to maximize the returns on your existing investments!

Security Automation

What is SecOps and how it helps in enhancing organizational security?

At present, so many businesses have deployed the use of SecOps to incorporate security into their organizational processes. SecOps is very important to the sustainability of business operations as connected devices continue to penetrate the market.

 What is SecOps?

Also known as Security Operations, SecOps involves the collaboration of security and IT operation teams; it is a practice of automating necessary security actions that ensure an organization does not compromise on security when achieving performance goals. It also involves the introduction of security measures at early and each stage of a software development lifecycle.

How does SecOps enhance organizational security?

Using the traditional approach, IT departments and security teams had different priorities, and this often leads to clashes, thereby making the organization security vulnerable to risk. It is also expensive and leads to a lot of backlogs. 

However, SecOps modernizes the traditional security approach. This is because; here, all members are fully involved in all stages of the production process, including security and operations. 

SecOps requires the collaboration of the security and operations teams who are both accountable for the efficiency and security. With these combined efforts, great insight into the organization’s security and vulnerabilities can be gotten on time and solutions provided faster. SecOps is also scalable, affordable, and cost-effective.

 Why use SecOps?

From enhancing organizational security through integration, orchestration, and automation, there are so many benefits of adopting the use of SecOps in every organization.

  • Integration: SecOps provides better visibility into the security risk of an organization and a speedy way to resolve those risks.
  • Proactive security: While using SecOps, security becomes the priority of teams; this implies that product security will be treated as important from the first to the last stage. 
  • Use of security tools to understand endpoints: SecOps allows IT and security teams to work together by using security tools to understand endpoints and also provide a proactive risk assessment.
  • Streamlines IT operations: SecOps allows the streamlining of IT operations, which leads to improved efficiency, minimal downtimes, and more successful deployment.

Best practices for implementing SecOps in every organization

To ensure that SecOps is smoothly implemented in your organization, here are some best practices to follow:

  • Have a strategy: It is vital to clearly define your goals before subjecting your systems and people to changes. 
  • Perform formal SecOps training: Training of employees is very important for every organization that wants to deploy SecOps. For this training, you can choose to use third party courses or ready-made training material. 
  • Avoid pitfalls: SecOps enhance teamwork between software teams. However, you must try to avoid all forms of pitfalls by promoting cross-team operations and communications.
  • Use the right second tools. There are basically five tools that can be used in deploying SecOps in an organization: These are 
  1. Configuration management tools used for updating key systems when vulnerabilities are detected
  2. Automated incident response tools make it easy for organizations to respond to incidents faster
  3. Security monitoring tools provide visibility into IT systems and data
  4. Security automation tools are used to streamline processes.
  5. Container technologies used to simplify software delivery, deploy bug fixes.

Finally, although SecOps requires an organizational change, it actually pays off in the long run. Through SecOps, organizations can increase their Return on Investment, enhance security, improve productivity, and also get rid of backlogs.

Security Automation

Benefits of Security Automation and Orchestration

In today’s high-risk cyber environment, it is extremely vital to respond to security incidents in real-time. Security orchestration and security automation are often used interchangeably within an IT ecosystem, despite serving different purposes to achieve this.

Security automation vs. security orchestration

Security automation is the process of setting up a security task or operation to run without human intervention. Some tasks, especially those that need a human decision, are semi-automated. Orchestration, on the other hand, means the utilization of multiple automated processes within a single or more platform.

As such, multiple semi-automated and fully automated security operations enable orchestration, and this automatically executes complex workflows and processes. Orchestration allows optimization and streamlining of repeatable processes, thus ensuring correct task execution.

Security automation and orchestration has become mandatory

As cyber-attacks become more intelligent and complex, automating and orchestrating security functions has become a necessity due to the following benefits:

  1. Speed response:Security, Automation, and Response (SOAR) allows security teams to quickly identify and respond to incidences. Rather than using different tools, they are all integrated in a single platform that can be accessed easily.
  2. Integrates security tools with threat intelligence:Automating and orchestrating security tools allows integration with internally collected security threat data and external intelligence. Contextualizing and correlating threat data using multiple tools ensures the timely discovery of threat sources and vulnerabilities, ensuring mitigation before they are exploited.
  3. Simplified investigative processes: Automation and orchestration enable deployed security tools to investigate low-level risks on their own. For more complex alarms, SOAR tools provide a unified repository for security information, thus permitting faster and more accurate investigations.
  4. Integration with daily operations: Continuous monitoring is vital to identifying security threats while automating and orchestrating security tasks provides the ability to respond to these threats within minutes rather than days or weeks.

Security Automation

Importance of Automation & Orchestration in Security Operations

While the information security sector is rapidly progressing, it still proves to be a constant challenge for companies and governments all over the world. Organizations from all sectors invest heavily on information security to make sure its data and information is safe from both the inside as well as the outside threats.

Continue Reading

Defend Your Business Against Downtime and Cyber Threats

The comprehensive solutions and services provided by Infrascape helps to proactively avoid network downtime and secure against cyber threats.
Contact Us
Grid
Grid
General Enquiries

info@infrascape.com

Sales Enquiries

sales@infrascape.com

Support
Login

All rights reserved. © Infrascape

Linkedin
Twitter
Facebook
Envelope
Scroll to top