Predictions 2020: Is Security Automation the Answer?

Security automation is the future. It is the only sustainable system that would survive this new era against security threats.

What is security automation?

Security automation is a method to automate your cybersecurity actions. Security automation identifies, inspects and handles cyber threats pragmatically through machines. It may have human intervention as well, according to the firm's policies and requirements.

Security automation takes the significant cyber-attacks load on itself, so the human team no longer have to tackle every threat manually. 

Security automation can

• Identify cybersecurity threats
• Determine the urgency and severity of a threat according to the standard set by security analysts of the firm
• Decide if action should be taken or not
• Resolve the issue

All of the steps usually are a matter of seconds without any input from a security person. Security automation makes sure that all the repeated measures are taken from the hands of staff and given to an automated system. Through machine learning and A.I, routine matters are solved efficiently, and human resources are focused more on value-adding tasks like ethical hacking. ESG research shows that I.T teams don't respond to 74% of the threats on time even if they have a predetermined code of action. This is just because of the volume of the threats and the alerts they get daily. Security automation makes sure that it does not happen. It also compensates for human error

What makes security automation so crucial in 2020?

Cybercrimes are increasing in frequency as well as severity. These attacks can range from data breaches for identity theft to espionage for ruining a firm's reputation. Cybint Solutions researched, around 62% of businesses had to overcome some kind of cybersecurity problem in the year 2018. And from there, numbers have only increased. The University of Maryland has concluded that hackers attack a system around 2,244 times per day. That makes an attack every 39 seconds. Imagine how vulnerable a firm can be with such immense pressure from cyber attackers.

Let's look at the previous year. In only the first six months of the year, data breachers have leaked 4.1 billion records(RiskBased), and that is just the first half. If we try to examine the effects of these breaches, according to (Security Intelligence), the average cost that the firm had to bear due to data breaches was around 3.9 million dollars.

With all of this going around, the cybersecurity teams have to face a lot more than they used to.they have to monitor a lot, including IoT devices, mobile devices, and cloud infrastructure. If the firm is not using automation security, employees have to monitor all of this manually. In doing so, they are wasting a lot of precious time because not every alert and every threat needs to be eliminated. A lot of these alerts are redundant. Cybersecurity team needs to remain focused on the issues which need in-depth investigation.

The market gap

According to a survey by CSIS 82% I.T decision-makers report shortage of cybersecurity experts and by 2020, this shortage will reach up to 1.8 million seats

This shortage will cause a rise in cybersecurity professional's salaries, and they will be challenging to find as well. To cover for the human teams' firms would be forced to automate their security systems.

But always be careful to appoint professionals with certifications like cissp certification training and cisa online training to do the job. This skill set gap will affect the quality of security professionals. Especially the ethical hackers so try to make people with ceh certification online training to be a part of your team.

When should you sign up for security automation?

2020 is the year to introduce security automation in your firm if you already have not. Although you should have started using security automation by now, but if your firm is facing the following problems, do not waste a minute and contact your security provider. 

• A breach has occurred in your system. It means that your human team was not able to handle the case, and they have already failed once. Now is the time to automate our system. You can not afford to be inactive with your security measures now.
• Your security system is lagging in response time. Your security team can only respond to a number of alerts manually. With A.I and machine learning response time can be reduced very easily, and routine work can be handled very efficiently. 
• False-positive are taking over. False positives take a lot of time because the security team has to investigate first before declaring the threat as false positive. That causes waste of a lot of time, energy and resources.
• When You want to achieve cost-effectiveness.
• If ethical hackers are finding ways to breach your systems, again and again, designate the smaller and repetitive tasks to an automated system for the best results.

If firms still don't opt for security automation even in 2020, we should expect an increased amount of misconfigurations in their cybersecurity systems which will cause more breaches and many more challenges to be faced by security teams. By introducing the right amount of security automation in the system, organizations will enjoy better utilization of resources and security systems solid as rocks.

Summary:

• Security automation is a method to make your cybersecurity actions automated.
• Cybercrimes are increasing in frequency as well as the severity
• If the firm is not using automation security employees, have to monitor all of this manually
•  by 2020, the shortage of cybersecurity expert will reach up to 1.8 million seats
• 2020 is the year to introduce security automation in your firm if you already have not
• A lot of security alerts are redundant that can easily be handled through security automation.
• If firms still don't opt for security automation even in 2020, we should expect an increased amount of misconfigurations in their cybersecurity systems which will cause more breaches and many more challenges to be faced by security teams