Latest Trends and Best Practices in Security Automation

Did you know the global average cost of a data breach in 2022 was a whopping $4.35 million? As the frequency and magnitude of security incidents snowball, companies across all sectors must have comprehensive security and compliance management practices in place to protect business assets, customer data, and the brand.

But the constant barrage of attacks that the post-pandemic world is witnessing often overwhelms even the most qualified and skilled security teams from identifying and resolving emerging threats. This is where security automation comes into play. Read on to uncover the need for security automation and the latest trends and best practices to embrace.

Top Security Automation Trends to Keep an Eye On

With IT infrastructures growing in size and complexity, manually managing security and compliance can result in slower detection and remediation of issues. Systems or devices vulnerable to attacks can impact functionality, lead to a poor user experience, and also result in unplanned and expensive downtime.

Security automation allows for critical security risk assessment, testing, and remediation tasks to be performed much faster, in a scalable way, and with fewer errors. By streamlining daily operations and integrating security into the IT foundation, including processes, applications, and hybrid cloud structures, organizations can minimize their threat surface area and reduce the average cost of a breach by a large margin. 

Not only does investing in security automation tools strengthen the security posture of any business, but it also frees teams to focus on more critical functions. Here are the latest trends and best practices in security automation that you must know: 

1. AI Adoption Will Continue to Grow

Although security teams will rely on Robotic Process Automation to automate security tasks, the adoption of AI tools for threat detection and prevention will continue to grow. AI-based products will help organizations proactively recognize and interpret data patterns and trigger alarms faster. By security risk assessment even before they occur, these tools will offer more advanced ways of mitigating cyber threats. According to the aforementioned data breach study, organizations that adopt AI tools for security automation can experience a 74-day shorter data breach lifecycle and save an average of $3 million. 

2. Security Automation Will Increasingly Be Used for Compliance

The growing complexity of compliance requirements is, in fact, one of the top drivers of security automation. In the coming years, automation will not just be used for automating key security tasks. Instead, more and more organizations will embrace security automation to streamline their compliance processes and score well on their audits. 

As a trusted security partner, Xoriant helped a leading global bank automate the vulnerability assessment and remediation of 150 network and security devices and achieved a 97% compliance in just 12 weeks, strengthening their security posture.

3. Zero Trust Will Be the Name of the Game

Most companies today understand the significance of having a zero-trust policy, but not many are able to achieve their zero-trust goals. As security attacks and attack surfaces get increasingly advanced, automating the authentication and authorization of users and validating security configurations before granting access will help address modern-day security challenges for businesses. Moreover, this will help secure remote workers across dispersed hybrid cloud environments.

For instance, if a user machine is not up to date with organization standard policies, via automation, security teams can ensure necessary updates are implemented and only then allow the machine to connect to the enterprise network. 

4. Automation Will Transform Security Incident Response

According to the data breach study, detecting and containing security breaches within 200 days reduces the average cost of a data breach by $1.22 million. Automating the security incident response process can quicken the decision-making process and ensure remediation across a growing ecosystem of platforms, applications, and tools. By automating complicated, time-consuming, and error-prone incident response tasks, businesses will be able to rapidly enable remediation across affected systems and respond to incidents faster.

5. Security Automation Will Be Integral in Product Design

In the coming years, security automation will also be adopted early in the development lifecycle. Instead of relying on manual tools and processes to detect security loopholes in code, development teams will depend on automated tools to shift security left. Such automation will help in reviewing the design, architecture, and behavior of the product as it is being developed, identifying performance bottlenecks in time, and enabling better fine-tuning. 

Leveraging Security Automation: How Xoriant Can Help You Succeed

As the complexity of modern security incidents grows and skilled resources become increasingly difficult to find, relying on automation to perform critical security actions goes a long way in detecting, investigating, and remediating cyber threats. Security automation can help organizations in several profound ways. It can:

• Accelerate the security risk assessment, detection, and resolution
• Recognize patterns in large data sets
• Result in substantial cost savings
• Simplify compliance
• Safeguard endpoint devices
• Fuel a zero-trust culture
• Streamline the security incident response process

As a company with decades of security experience, Xoriant is always on the cutting edge of new tools and technologies. Our trusted advisors bring global expertise in advanced threat and vulnerability management and can help you implement the best solutions within your specific business context. We can protect your legacy systems, cloud-native, and mobile apps with equal finesse and ensure your business is free from current and imminent vulnerabilities.

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