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Solve common problems in cybersecurity with automation.

In the last year, technology companies like Puppet, Chef and Phantom have been making headlines, and buzzwords like automation and orchestration have been sweeping enterprise organizations. These OEMs are industry disrupters and changing the game when it comes to solving some serious headaches in our day-to-day activities.

Let's talk about automation and orchestration from a cybersecurity standpoint.

After countless conversations with security operations teams around the country, I've found one thing to be certain: organizations rarely have enough people, process or technology to optimally secure their organization.

Part of this is because of the increased sophistication of attackers, as well as ever growing attack surfaces. But I've also found that countless repetitive or manual daily processes burden security teams. These can include investigating incidents, correlating data between systems and utilizing threat intelligence resources. According to Enterprise Strategy Group, 75 percent of security events and/or alerts are ignored in the average large enterprise.

One can argue the five most common problems in cybersecurity are resources, the endless assembly line of point products, static independent controls with no orchestration, speed of detection/triage and increasing operational costs. We can most likely list 10 or 15 more, but the bottom line is that there is no shortage of time-consuming, mundane activities for security operations teams.

Automation as a security tool

Automation and orchestration is one of the fastest growing sub-sectors in cybersecurity, with an estimated $170B market size by 2020.

Through cybersecurity automation, organizations can expect real, measurable business outcomes that solve some of their toughest challenges. Automation has the potential to improve an analyst's incident mean time to threat mitigation, reduce customer exposure to security threats, create less risk, increase focus on threats that matter and even create lower employee turnover.

So, let's see where your security program falls on the automation scale. If you have trouble answering any of these three questions, you may be a prime candidate for automating some elements of your program.

  1. How do you augment your overworked and understaffed Security Operations Center (SOC) team?
  2. How are you automating your response/remediation process for areas like malware investigation and containment, indicator hunting and phishing investigations?
  3. Are you able to act on all the high fidelity alerts from your Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) in a timely manner?

Work smarter with automation

Security is complicated. Instead of working harder, we need to work smarter, and automation can help with that.

To learn more about your automation and orchestration options, request our Security Automation Workshop. During this two- to four-hour whiteboard session, you'll discover how you can use your existing products coupled with an automation platform to reduce the response and remediation gap caused by limited resources.