By Enterprise Security Magazine | Friday, October 16, 2021
Automation has become a business-critical partner for allowing the work-from-home SOC, mitigating the burden for SOC staff, and possibly reducing staffing needs.
FREMONT, CA: A few months ago, only 3.5 percent of employees worked remotely. Today, that number has jumped to 74 percent. That is an incredible transition in daily operations, particularly in the way IT and security teams work. As enterprises increasingly establish work-from-home initiatives, maintaining business continuity and productivity is vital. Security is critical to the fulfillment of this shift. Cybercriminals will take advantage of any weakness. There are many things enterprises can do to ensure employees stay safe while maintaining resiliency. Central to this is making sure that the organization continues running securely, particularly when it comes to the security operations center (SOC.) Here us how the security team remains powerful using automation.
Automation and mitigating reliance on personnel is a vital aspect of maintaining an effective security operation. If manpower is limited, investment in automation should be increased. Automating the SOC can reduce staffing requirements, which is invaluable when members are unable to work. Migration to the cloud has also reduced people’s demand to be in a data center and physically manage systems. In security operations, the major hurdle has always been the limitations of human nature. No matter how smart human security analysts are, they will never get faster at monitoring vast quantities of security data that an enterprise’s sensors generate. Automation is a valuable tool that manages this disconnect.
A SOC’s operational processes are formally structured, regular, and repeatable. The majority of today’s SOCs are built according to patterns that are highly responsive to automation. Enterprises can automate tasks that would be impossible for human brains to do, including correlating an IP address connected with an alert with a series of events on another part of the network. Automation can ensure that the team members can focus on more interesting things than console monitoring, like threat hunting. If automation can better analyze security data than humans, SOC analysts are less likely to get burned out. Automation also decreases the chance of errors and employee turnover, which ultimately helps enterprises stay resilient, even during tough times.