Cybersecurity is a tough, dynamic line of work. On any given day, you could be dealing with a phishing attack, insider breach, and previously unseen technology being used to launch an attack against your company. As cyberattacks become increasingly sophisticated, you must be prepared to invest time and resources to successfully defend against every potential threat. The single most effective way to free up more of your cybersecurity team’s time is through automation. By automating elements of your Incident Response Plan (IRP)you are able to meet the most stringent monitoring and protection standards. An IRP that is compliant with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)—the gold standard for IRP best practices—insists that you perform comprehensive, continuous monitoring of all assets and be proactively looking for opportunities to eliminate potential risks before an asset is threatened or compromised. Because these requirements are almost impossible to carry out manually, you need automated systems to take care of routine, straightforward monitoring and analysis, freeing up your time to focus on more advanced, creative strategies and techniques. Automated systems can monitor and analyze huge amounts of data instantaneously, helping you to spot trends and gain insights that no human being could match. Automated systems also provide comprehensive incident management and assist in investigating the root cause of breaches. Let’s explore the five aspects of your cybersecurity IRP that can be improved with help from automated systems.
24/7 monitoring and analysis
An organization’s network infrastructure can become the target of tens of thousands of cyber incidents on a daily basis. These incidents almost always are resolved before they ever threaten any infrastructure; however, the only way to guarantee that a potential threat doesn’t slip through is to engage in comprehensive, continuous monitoring and analysis. An automated, fully integrated cybersecurity platform can provide this level of monitoring efficiently and effectively. In this day and age, 24/7 monitoring is the only way that organizations can stay one step ahead of hackers.
Incident response
Left to their own devices, cybersecurity teams will create their own workflows and record-keeping strategies for dealing with incidents. These approaches aren’t efficient, nor do they provide the level of visibility demanded by company executives. An automated incident response platform, by contrast, should offer a fully integrated central hub for logging incidents, deploying resources, providing real-time status updates, and directing how cases are managed. It helps establish a standardized, best-practices process by which all incidents are handled, ensuring everyone—from the most junior member of a cybersecurity team to the CTO of a company—has comprehensive, real-time visibility into incidents.
Reporting and compliance audits
So much of cybersecurity involves adhering to strict data integrity and confidentiality standards. A cybersecurity team spends a considerable amount of time working with legal, regulatory affairs, and similar folks to ensure the organization remains compliant with its legal, regulatory, and contractual obligations to its customers. And all of these folks require documentation that demonstrates compliance, typically in the form of data-intensive reports. Rather than force cybersecurity teams to generate this information manually, an integrated incident management platform can generate these recurring reports automatically. During audits, outside parties can easily find the data they need without burdening the cybersecurity staff.
SIEM data transfer
Without the aid of an automated cybersecurity system, the team’s ability to gain insights into threats is dependent on human power. Humans, of course, cannot possibly comb through hundreds of thousands of data points about network anomalies, traffic pattern aberrations, and other unusual activity. Automated threat detection systems, by contrast, can log and sort through this myriad of minor incidents over time, and provide immediate analysis and assessment of potential threats. An IRP should be able to integrate with your SIEM to capture the incident data, and help guide your team through the threat specific incident response. In the midst of a cyberattack, the last thing your organization wants is to face unnecessarily slow response times and to be following cumbersome, manual processes. Fortunately, automated cybersecurity management platforms can usher in a new era of expediency and efficiency in containing security breaches. Automation can provide 24/7 monitoring, comprehensive incident management, the ability to effortlessly generate reports, and critical intelligence about potential threats.
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