10 Key Benefits of Security Automation

Security professionals have a lot to deal with: constant alerts, a growing attack surface to protect, and looming burnout. But there might be an ally in this battle – security automation. Automation is invaluable for cybersecurity professionals everywhere who seek ways to protect assets, reduce risks, and boost productivity without sacrificing safety or security requirements. 

The world we live in today demands robust security measures. This is where security automation comes in to provide a much-needed solution. 

But first, what is Security Automation?

Security automation refers to the use of technology to automatically manage and remediate repetitive security tasks. This can include tasks to monitor for security alerts, detect and mitigate threats, manage vulnerabilities, and ensure compliance with security policies and regulations. 

Now let’s explore 10 benefits of security automation that can help make managing complex cyber strategies easier. From reducing workloads to heightening accuracy - it's an essential tool to stay ahead of endless tasks.

How Security Automation Benefits Security Practitioners

Whether it’s no-code, low-code, or even-more-code, security automation platforms offer a range of benefits for security professionals.

Reduce Manual Operations

One of the most obvious benefits of automating security operations is the reduction in manual tasks. Security automation platforms automatically execute low-level, repetitive tasks to free up time for security practitioners to focus on higher level demands. In the example below, you’ll see just how many steps can be automated in a typical security workflow.

Reducing manual security tasks brings its own advantages. It makes responses faster and more accurate, ensures consistency and minimizes errors in tasks like compliance checks. Moreover, it helps teams adapt to growth without extra effort, while boosting morale by engaging experts in meaningful work. 

Faster Incident Response Times

When it comes to incident response, time is of the essence. Security breaches can happen in the blink of an eye, so you must respond just as quickly to limit the damage. Thankfully, security automation tools can help reduce MTTD and MTTR for faster triage. 

By automating certain tasks, like verifying IOCs with VirusTotal or sending reports on new Orca alerts, you can free up time to tackle more complex issues and reduce response times to mere minutes. And with constantly evolving threats, every second counts. 

Standardize Security Processes

Practically every organization has standardized security processes, and for good reason. Many industries, like MSSPs, rely on formal processes to avoid inconsistencies while their large teams of SOC analysts triage alerts across clients. It’s critical to make sure every step is followed correctly so nothing is missed. 

Security automation platforms follow the rules you give it, every single time a workflow is executed. This eliminates manual errors and ensures security measures are followed consistently across tenants. 

Improve Security Compliance

Another benefit of security automation is that it works alongside your team to improve security compliance. Instead of relying on manual processes, automating your security processes ensures that all industry regulations and standards are met. Workflows can be automated to adhere to many compliance standards, like SOC 2 and ISO 27001. 

This not only helps protect company data and customer information, but also serves as a demonstration to clients and partners that the company is taking necessary measures to ensure their security. As a result, there is a renewed sense of optimism that these organizations will be able to tackle new security challenges head-on, with a new level of efficiency and determination.

Reduce False Positives & Alert Fatigue

When organizations deal with a massive number of security alerts, it can be tough to weed out false positives. Overtime, triaging these false positives takes a toll on security analysts, which increases the risk of human error and alert fatigue.

With security automation, alarms and events are analyzed through an efficient algorithm, significantly reducing the number of false positives. The result is that security professionals can focus on real threats rather than getting bogged down with too many false alarms.

Benefits of No-Code Security Automation

In theory, any automation approach could produce the benefits covered above. No-code security automation offers additional competitive benefits that can significantly enhance an organization's cybersecurity posture and operational efficiency. Benefits specific to no-code and low-code automation approaches include:

Quicker Implementation

One of the most significant benefits unique to no-code security automation is the speed and ease of implementation. Unlike legacy security automation platforms that can take months to deploy and require specialized engineering skills, no-code solutions offer swift deployment, enabling you to add them in your security ecosystem with minimal friction. The faster you can deploy the platform, the sooner you can start automating.

Drag-and-Drop Workflow Editing

No-code security automation simplifies the workflow automation process by not requiring coding skills. It provides a user-friendly interface where you can drag and drop elements to create workflows. Intuitive editing options, workflow libraries, and self-service portals help anyone automate processes. With no coding needed, you can deploy solutions faster and empower security experts to design effective automation without deep technical knowledge.

Improve Cost Savings

No-code security automation offers impressive cost savings by reducing the need for outsourced developer support and enabling security teams to handle a larger volume of tasks without adding more headcount. 

Manual coding may take weeks – or even months – in order to fully implement, but no-code automation eliminates this tedious step altogether. This not only reduces the time it takes to get up and running, but also makes it easier to make changes as needed. This makes it an ideal solution to increase your security measures without breaking the bank.

Greater Scalability

No-code security automation is easily scalable, enabling you to extend automated security measures to new use cases and environments as your needs grow.

Unlike traditional security automation methods, which often involve limited use cases and cumbersome processes, no-code automation allows for immediate implementation across diverse use cases. Blink, for instance, automates tasks across SOC, incident response, cloud security, vulnerability management, identity and access management (IAM), GRC, and even HR security.

Boost Productivity 

By automating security tasks such as vulnerability management and incident response, security professionals and teams gain a major productivity boost. This is evident through improvements across security performance metrics. 

Dwell times are reduced, since threats can be identified sooner. False positives are eliminated, which improves efficiency across team members. Security professionals become more satisfied with their work, which has quantifiable benefits in boosting productivity and reducing burnout.

Additional Benefits with Gen-AI Powered Automation

Security automation is a must-have for organizations of all sizes. But forward-thinking companies are looking for ways to improve the security efficiency even more. That’s what generative AI comes in.

No-code security automation solutions powered by generative AI offer a new range of benefits for security. For instance, Blink empowers anyone in your organizations to automate. By typing in a single prompt, Blink Copilot generates a fully functional automated workflow in seconds. 

Streamlining manual processes with no-code security automation helps security professionals more effectively prioritize tasks and triage alerts. With modern automation solutions, like Blink, they can also boost productivity even more with easier and faster automation that leverages generative AI. 

Blink Copilot enables anyone to generate automated workflows with a single prompt. Explore how Blink benefits security practitioners with accessible automation for any use case. Schedule a demo today.