Network security automation offers organizations a powerful way to strengthen their overall security posture by streamlining critical processes and reducing human error. Beyond handling routine tasks, automation enables seamless collaboration between teams, ensures continuous compliance, and provides a proactive defense against sophisticated cyber threats.
This blog highlights four key strategies to leverage automation for transformative results in your security operations.
What Is Automation in Network Security?
Automation in network security is the process of using software solutions to programmatically execute security tasks. Typically, security automation is used to manage the low-complexity, high-volume aspects of detection, investigation, and mitigation. For instance, automation can separate false alerts from true threats among the 10,000 security alerts every enterprise receives on an average day.
However, automation can (and should) be used more strategically, strengthening the organization as a whole rather than solely focusing on streamlining tedious processes in understaffed, overworked security operations centers (SOCs).
On a practical level, automation is often perceived to consist of scripts written by administrators to relieve some of the burden of manual labor associated with specific tasks. That is certainly one way to use automation. However, it presents many of the same problems as manual processes:
- Potential human errors that create security threats
- The need human intervention to kick off the automation manually
- Limited scalability as ad-hoc scripts often address only specific problems, making it challenging to adapt to larger, more complex network environments
None of this should be surprising: despite its wide adoption in the enterprise world, automation is still an emerging technology that many organizations haven’t yet mastered.
Why Most Organizations Fail at Automation
The ineffective implementation of automation leaves sensitive data vulnerable, as many organizations struggle with outdated tools, fragmented teams, and a lack of cohesive strategy.
Failure to Implement
The number one reason most organizations miss out on the benefits of automation is that they never get started. Despite the growing challenges of understaffed security teams and increasing workloads, many organizations continue to rely on outdated tools like spreadsheets and emails to handle critical security tasks.
This reliance not only slows down operations but also leaves gaps in addressing the ever-growing number of detected vulnerabilities. Without adopting automation, these organizations risk falling behind in their ability to manage change and maintain a strong security posture.
Siloed Teams
IT teams frequently work in silos that are intended to foster laser-sharp focus. But the result instead is costly redundancy and inefficient one-off approaches to security. Enterprises end up baking in a “hero culture” that sets up employees to fail when they write automation scripts that don’t solve an issue because their authors lacked a holistic understanding of the entire infrastructure, organizational priorities, and user needs.
As a result, organizations end up with a spotty patchwork of automation scripts that support neither cybersecurity nor business continuity.
Lack of Strategic Approach
Businesses need to understand how automation can support their overall business strategy. Instead of saying, “A machine can do this time consuming task,” they should be asking, “How can we use automation to help achieve our strategic directives?” The answers to that question can be used to determine what should be automated, in what order, and to what extent.
On a tactical level, processes should be established to ensure that scripts are tested, reusable, and documented in a central location.
True automation can accomplish far more complex and strategic work when applied with the whole organization in mind. One example would be policy change management across your enterprise. With every company operating as a software company, DevOps must be a key part of the automation strategy. Rapidly evolving regulations also demand that compliance processes be seamlessly integrated into automation efforts. Additionally, the rise of automated cyberattacks makes it essential to incorporate cybersecurity into the organization-wide automation framework.
Key Benefits of Cybersecurity Automation Tools
Network security automation offers numerous advantages, from improving collaboration to enhancing proactive threat protection. Here are the top ways it can transform your organization’s security approach and help teams address challenges more effectively while strengthening their overall security posture.
Better DevOps and SecOps Cohesion
Developers are under pressure to continuously improve efficiency and enhance usability. They are stereotyped as not caring much about security, but that’s not true. The reality is that they care, but they lack the skills to incorporate gold-standard processes into the applications they write. This isn’t a knock on developers: they aren’t trained to be security professionals.
A benefit of automation is that it can organically support both development and security operations, eliminating the friction between the needs of these groups. For instance, developers can spin up a new development server and the change can automatically be ingested into the infrastructure map.
An organization can also make automated security part of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) by building testing into the process instead of tacking it on at the end of the cycle. Planning for security automation requires both teams to work together and understand the priorities of the other, leading to better communication—for the automation plan and beyond.
Always-On Compliance
Almost every change to an infrastructure can affect an organization’s state of compliance. For instance, misconfiguring a firewall or failing to apply a patch are common mistakes that can throw an organization out of compliance. In today’s complex environments, those types of errors are so pervasive that it’s unlikely any organization is ever truly in compliance at all, and won’t be for the foreseeable future.
According to Gartner, 99% of firewall breaches are caused by misconfigurations, not firewall flaws — something automation helps prevent.
Fear-Free Auditing
Another challenge is the rapid pace at which regulations are changing. Organizations that overhauled their data systems to comply with the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) understand the pains they will face trying to comply with new laws.
We recommend that organizations try to get ahead of the coming wave by anticipating the tasks and policies that will be expected of them and start implementing and testing the appropriate software tools as soon as possible.
One smart step businesses can take right now is to remove manual configuration and administration tasks from all business processes that involve sensitive information, consumer privacy issues, and cybersecurity concerns. Instead, use automation to continuously monitor the infrastructure for compliance.
Getting ahead of regulatory requirements delivers the added benefit of a faster return on investment (ROI), as the time and costs currently spent configuring policies and ensuring readiness to meet complex audit demands are reduced. For example, some of the ways network security automation tools support compliance are:
- Performing ongoing network risk analysis
- Recertifying existing rules and policies
- Scoring and trending IT risk posture
- Generating standardized reports
Proactive Network Protection
“Hackers today—they’re not even hacking. They’re using automation tools,” says FireMon’s Tim Woods, Vice President of Technology Alliances. This reality underscores how malicious use of automation has evolved to permeate every stage of an attack, from reconnaissance to execution. Hackers might write scripts to scrape IT message boards, extracting usernames linked to targeted company employees, and use their technical questions to gather insights about the network environment they intend to breach. Structured profiles built from such data can then fuel spear phishing and business email compromise (BEC) attacks.
And hackers don’t have to be computer geniuses to deploy automation maliciously. In one attack, a malicious actor used automated hacking tools to find public webcams with a view of a Swedish harbor and was able to monitor and identify submarine activity in the port, including lengths of deployment, range of travel, and possibly destination of travel, This attack was simple enough that almost anyone could have conducted it.
The automated hacking tool used in that and many other attacks was most likely purchased on the dark web. Tools can cost as little as $50. These marketplaces are also host to sellers of stolen credentials. Malicious actors don’t need the skill to steal credentials on their own – they can just buy them for a dollar or two each. Then they can drop the credentials into an automated tool they’ve purchased and conduct an attack without ever having written a single line of code.
With criminals exploiting these capabilities, security teams need to use automated threat detection and response to outpace them. To attempt to do so manually would be pointless – it would be impossible to keep up.
Using automated security tools against hackers has another benefit. Besides just stopping attacks, automation frees up SecOps teams to anticipate and proactively develop rules to protect against hackers.
FireMon Automates Your Business, Not Your Tasks
A happy marriage between DevOps and SecOps, continuous compliance, and the ability to manage a sophisticated and volatile threat environment are solid advantages of automation. There are probably other use cases in your organization as well, which will be exposed when you start thinking about how to apply automation in a way that supports your entire business instead of just streamlining low-complexity, high-volume tasks.
FireMon can help you find these opportunities. Our platform delivers a comprehensive blueprint of policy management capabilities that powers smart security process automation to effectively address your unique use case, infrastructure, or compliance requirements.
Our multi-level approach to automated cybersecurity drives efficiency by decreasing response times to security incidents. It also enhances your agility and aligns automated tasks to your specific requirements across your on-premise, cloud or hybrid environments, allowing you to manage your automation journey at your pace and confidence level.
Request a demo today and see how FireMon can help drive your organization’s network security automation.