Recognizing and Executing Security Automation Scenarios
In today's rapidly evolving digital landscape, staying ahead of potential security threats is paramount. A four-phase approach can help security leaders identify high-priority areas for security automation within their organisations.
Baseline the Environment
The first phase involves conducting a comprehensive assessment of your current security operations. This includes identifying pain points where automation could reduce overhead and improve risk prioritization. Key areas of focus are security alerts that accumulate without resolution, repetitive manual triage tasks, and handoffs that delay responses. Measuring false positive rates, response times, and operational friction is essential to pinpoint areas that could benefit from automation [1].
Normalize Data Inputs
The second phase requires aggregating and standardizing data from all relevant security sources, such as vulnerability scanners, asset inventories, endpoint protections, cloud environments, identity systems, and external threat intelligence. Resolving duplicates and reconciling conflicting identifiers while enriching data with business context creates a reliable foundation for accurate risk scoring, machine learning, and automation effectiveness [1].
Prioritize Based on Risk and Business Context
In the third phase, the normalized data is analysed to identify and rank vulnerabilities or security risks based on exploit likelihood, asset criticality, and business impact. This enables focused remediation and patching cycles that optimize resource use and reduce exposure to critical threats [2].
Implement Phased Automation and Controls
The final phase involves deploying automation tools and security controls gradually through well-defined phases, starting with a pilot on representative assets, then expanding to departments and full organisation-wide coverage. Emphasis is placed on automation in detection, triage, and remediation workflows to reduce manual bottlenecks and scale security operations [3][5].
Common activities required to reach an objective are likely to already be developed by a group of domain experts, saving time when automating objectives. However, many security leaders struggle with identifying common security automation scenarios and implementing custom automations.
The gains analysis, a crucial step in the process, should give security leaders a good idea of the processes and tasks needed to drive playbook development, and yield the success metrics to validate the effort required to develop the automation. Common barriers to security automation include automating the wrong things, incorrect prioritization of use cases, misunderstanding what should be automated, and misunderstanding where to automate [4].
Security leaders can identify the top 5-10 candidates for automation from the prework phase that will provide the best outcomes, focusing on daily and often activities. To communicate potential gains from automation, security leaders can perform a gains analysis for their use cases, with one of the most effective ways being improvement over a baseline [4].
The upkeep of custom playbooks is an in-house responsibility. In the first phase, security leaders must gather automation requirements to avoid automating simply for the sake of automating. To establish a framework for identifying security automation use cases, security leaders should implement a four-phase approach, as outlined above.
Kevin Schmidt, a director analyst at Gartner, supports the GTP Secure Infrastructure team in security operations and researches AI usage in security operations. This structured approach ensures that security automation efforts target the most impactful areas, based on empirical assessment and risk-driven prioritization, while enabling scalable implementation and ongoing improvement of security posture [6].
During implementation, the playbook should be put into production operations so gains can be realized, operational processes must be updated to reflect playbook usage, and metrics for reporting should be communicated and revamped on a regular basis [4]. Playbooks will have a shelf life and will require maintenance and eventually retirement. During the development process, it's important to document any dependencies in the playbooks.
During testing, ensure that the task functions are working as expected, checking for API responsiveness, delays in delivery, and delivery errors. During use-case selection, security leaders should identify those security automations that can help save time, provide better predictability with respect to response, speed time to response/containment, and act as a force multiplier for the staff that is already in place. The type of activities any one operator performs shouldn't change much, but that individual's involvement in the activities and tasks will change.
References:
[1] Gartner, Inc.
[2] Gartner, Inc.
[3] Gartner, Inc.
[4] Gartner, Inc.
[5] Gartner, Inc.
[6] Gartner, Inc.
- To ensure the effectiveness of cybersecurity measures in the digital landscape, efforts should be made to prioritize privacy concerns in the context of data breach prevention, as part of comprehensive security operations and cybersecurity strategies.
- In the course of security automation, it's crucial to focus on normalizing data inputs across various security sources, such as vulnerability scanners and identity systems, to create a reliable foundation for accurate risk scoring and machine learning.
- As security leaders implement phased security automation and controls, they must strive to achieve a balance between automating common security use cases and customizing automation to meet specific organizational needs, while maintaining a focus on technology advancements and reducing manual bottlenecks in security operations.
