With the sheer number of cybersecurity resources your company may use, it can be easy for your network security team to get wrapped up in monotonous work.
Several tasks consume a lot of time and effort, but there’s a great chance that these are good candidates for cybersecurity automation.
Automation is ideal for activities that require a high amount of manual work without needing much thought or actual processing.
Cutting down on tasks that don’t require human effort for your overloaded security operations team will provide your company with several benefits. Below we have four of them that you can surely use to your advantage!
Saves Precious Time
Eliminating manual work that is easily completable through automation is a fantastic way to free up time for your security operations team.
These tasks are typically repetitive, encountered often, and take far more time than they are worth. Things like individually checking and investigating every single alert that appears is a great example.
This will allow your team to focus on higher-priority tasks like finding new ways to protect sensitive data, actively dealing with threats, and looking into methods to prevent them from happening in the first place.
Personnel resources are usually the least-expendable tool you have. This means that delegating your cybersecurity resources to something fairly unimportant and easily automated means that you are leaving your company vulnerable to threats.
Faster Threat Responses
When you have automated resources working on constant threat protection, it allows your company to enact faster threat responses.
The reach of a cyber attack can spread incredibly quickly, often faster than the time it takes to manually create protections for potential areas of attack. Dealing with a cyber-attack typically involves anticipating where it will go next, which requires analysis and eats up time from your security team.
With an automated cybersecurity system, it will automatically predict where an attack might spread to.
Not only do protections need to be created during a network attack, but they must also be quickly implemented. Manual implementation takes far too long and might not be effective at protecting other sources of data.
On the other hand, automated cybersecurity will also implement these protections to prevent an attack’s current and possible future behaviors. Cybersecurity teams are essential to keeping your network safe, but they are often unable to act quick enough in the middle of a live attack.
Fewer Mistakes
Another great benefit of automation is the reduction in mistakes that are made.
Your manual security team is one of the greatest cybersecurity tools you have available, but they are still human and therefore prone to human error.
One unfortunate reality is that almost all network security teams are overworked and overburdened. With so much on their plate, it becomes much easier to make simple mistakes that become extremely costly.
Minimizing the amount of human interactivity required for your cybersecurity tools is the best way to cut down on mistakes. Reducing your team’s overall workload will naturally make them more efficient and lower the chances of errors happening.
This doesn’t mean that you should completely get rid of a cybersecurity team, but instead being more realistic about what they can handle.
When your team is overburdened, it also becomes easy to make poorer decisions. With less time to critically analyze a situation, they may be inclined to picking a decision that saves time but ultimately ends up hurting the company.
With automated security processes at work, they’ll have less on their minds and can be aided by your cybersecurity tools rather than being slowed down.
Reduces the Need for Skilled Personnel
One final benefit of having automated network security tools is that it reduces the pressing need for skilled cybersecurity workers.
Cyber threats are incredibly complex and require staff with very specific knowledge on how to handle them. When you consider the array of network security tools your company may use, there’s a lot for any single individual of your team to learn and understand to be effective.
As it currently stands, the skills gap created by the field of cybersecurity has created a 3 million strong employee deficit. This means that several companies just don’t have the skilled staff they need to handle cyber threats today.
As a result, these companies are then forced to turn to automated solutions to bridge the gap. This is not always a bad thing, because network security automation does provide several benefits and frees up time for the skilled staff that is on hand.
Again, there’s never a great reason to eliminate a cybersecurity team, but the joint efforts of automation and manual work are the only way to deal with modern cyber threats.
Closing Thoughts
Network security is an incredibly tricky field that requires an incredibly intelligent team to effectively navigate it.
A large number of processes can (and should) be automated to reduce the workload of your operations team.
Doing so will free up time for higher-priority work, enable faster threat responses, cut down on mistakes, and reduce the glaring need for skilled personnel.
Through the combined efforts of a highly-skilled team and effective automation, your company will have the best defense available to defend against nefarious cyber threats.