Today’s IT professional is faced with the challenge of not only securing the multitude of digital technologies being introduced across different business functions, but fending off sophisticated attacks too.
In an effort to alleviate the pressure on the security team, many businesses have started to introduce orchestration technologies, helping streamline vital cyber operations and manage threats. By next year, Gartner predicts that 15% of businesses with security teams of more than five people will be using security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) tools to improve cybersecurity operations – a huge increase from the 1% recorded in 2017.
These tools will have a crucial role in the future of cybersecurity, and businesses need to start reaping their benefits now.
Streamlining the IT function
The biggest challenge for security teams in this chaotic world of digital disruption, is managing the vast number of systems across a business. Each system, whether it’s a VPN, email account, or external mobile device, industrial devices has its own challenge in terms of everyday management.
These challenges are only expected to intensify over the coming years with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices. According to IDC, global spending on IoT is expected to reach 1.3 trillion by next year. As the number of connected devices across a business increases, so does the number of devices that need to be secured.
Security orchestration tools connect a business’ disparate systems, tools and processes together, allowing the automation of repetitive, time laden tasks that limit the productivity of IT teams. This allows them to concentrate on maintaining critical security systems across the business and protecting them from attack.
Responding to breaches
However, orchestration can offer businesses much more than just automating security processes - it can also be used as the first line of defense in preventing a cyber-attack. The rise of digital technologies has helped criminals to develop complex methods for infiltrating cyber defenses, and a modern security team needs to be able to identify an array of security anomalies in order to avert the risk.
The nature of the technologies available to attackers today means that many can launch a barrage of attacks in any given second, and intervention by even the most capable security teams can’t guarantee the safety of an organization. They need the support of automation and orchestration tools to assist with the identification of a breach.
A security orchestration solution can automate routine investigatory processes, executing them with much more speed and accuracy than is possible with manual monitoring, and provide instant identification of a threat. It can also be used to correlate large amounts of data, allowing businesses to spot patterns, identify suspicious activity on a network, and stop a threat way before it has chance to manifest. AI (and its learning technics) is considered as the ideal complement to automation.
Driving efficiency
Once IT teams have orchestration technologies supporting their everyday security processes, they can begin to make an active impact to the efficiency of employees within their organization. As businesses become increasingly digital, the role of the IT professional is shifting to business enabler – access to information, flexible working, and communication are just a few of the things they are relied upon to improve.
The future success of many businesses will be influenced by the quality of its technology, and the skills of its IT team, and it is therefore crucial that the necessary investments are made around supporting automation technologies.
Orchestration even has a direct role to play in helping drive employee efficiency. The technologies can be applied by security teams to enable faster access to information across a company network and find automatic fixes to faults based on previous issues.
Many businesses are unnerved by the prospect of taking the management and security of important company data out of human hands, however orchestration and automation does not replace security teams, rather it works alongside them. The reality is that the modern CISO and their security team are of much more value to the success of a business, and their role needs to be supported by such technologies.
As digital disruption and IoT devices open up businesses to many different avenues of attack, orchestration will be crucial in identifying threats and helping security teams to prevent them.