Security Automation Best Practices: A Guide

Security automation can help you build the best security postures for your organization by enhancing efficiency and time-to-response. However, carelessly implementing security automation and not adhering to its best practices can hinder your organization's ability to prevent, investigate, and respond to cyber threats.

In this post, we'll cover these best practices, common tools, and technologies and provide some tangible examples of various use cases.

Understanding Security Automation

Security automation enables your security operations center (SOC) to automate routine tasks, such as threat detection, maintaining compliance with security policies and regulations, and managing vulnerabilities with minimal or no human intervention.

Benefits of Security Automation

Security automation platforms offer a range of benefits for your security team and organization:

1. Cost-effectiveness: Saves costs by reducing manual involvement. Also eliminates the need for outsourced developer support, reducing labor and infrastructure costs.
2. Eliminates alert fatigue: Handles the majority of threat-hunting duties automatically, eliminating alert fatigue. Security team members experience alert fatigue when an overload of notifications prevents them from investigating each one, posing a risk to your organization's security.
3. Faster incident response times: Reduces mean time to patch (MTTP) and mean time to respond (MTTR) for quicker triage.
4. Greater scalability: Helps extend automated security measures to new cases and environments as your organization's needs grow.
5. Enhanced security: Safeguards infrastructure and applications by diminishing reliance on manual intervention alone, which is usually fraught with errors.

Common Security Automation Tools and Technologies

Security automation tools prevent threats and manage security issues. The following are some common examples:

• Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR): Orchestrates security workflows and integrates incident response processes. SOAR platforms allow organizations to collect data from a range of sources, analyze it, and automate responses to low-level security threats.
• No-code automation: Enables your security team to integrate tools and automate your entire security workflow without code. These tools streamline tasks like incident response and vulnerability management. They also enable faster deployment of automation processes while reducing reliance on developer resources.
• Security information and event management (SIEM): Pulls, aggregates, and consolidates data from different sources to identify threats and vulnerabilities in real time.
• Extended detection and response (XDR): Centralizes and normalizes data from users, endpoints, and networks and rapidly responds to sophisticated threats using a unified detection and incident system with extensive monitoring.
• Cloud security automation: Ensures continuous monitoring and protection of cloud environments. There are scalable serverless solutions including forensics, incident response, and network security.
• Vulnerability management: Continuously scans systems for vulnerabilities, prioritizes them by risk, and even applies patches automatically.

Best Practices for Policy and Compliance Automations

Following these best practices can help your organization succeed, make sure your automation processes are efficient and scalable, and provide solid security protection:

1. Use monitoring and reporting tools: Real-time monitoring and automated reporting is the automated process of collecting and analyzing indicators of potential security threats and then prioritizing them with appropriate action. Teams must continuously monitor, test, and refine automated security processes so they function as intended. Additionally, regular monitoring and reporting ensure continuous compliance across systems.
2. Identify processes suitable for automation: Not all security and compliance tasks should be automated. The key is to identify processes that are repetitive, time-consuming, or prone to human error. Processes best suited for automation include log analysis and anomaly detection, access control enforcement, and compliance audits and reporting. Conversely, tasks that require human judgment, like risk assessments and policy decisions, shouldn't be automated.
3. Leverage AI: Implement machine-readable policies for automated data transfer checks and explainable AI tools such as LIME, and SHAP. These tools maintain compliance with evolving regulations and ensure transparency.
4. Integrate security automation into existing workflows: Security automation combines various tools and processes into existing workflows to automate critical cybersecurity tasks. This seamless integration enforces policies without disrupting operations. It also improves efficiency through automated compliance checks, threat detection, and incident response.
5. Regularly improve your security teams: Continuously provide training on new tools, up-to-date workflows, and evolving threats so your team can manage and optimize automation effectively.
6. Enforce zero trust principles: The zero trust security model prevents breaches by eliminating assumed trust. Apply this principle to your automated security processes so that no user, device, or application is inherently trusted. This strategy enhances your security by requiring verification at every access point.

Drawbacks of Security Automation

Some problems associated with security automation include the following:

• Over-reliance on automation: Automated processes alone can sometimes miss subtle threats that intuitive humans can pick up on.
• Skills gap: Many automation tools rely on AI or machine learning, requiring strong technical expertise. However, a shortage of talent often prevents effective implementation.
• Cost of adoption: Security automation involves high initial costs for tools and technologies, ongoing maintenance, training, and licensing expenses.
• Compliance requirements: Automated responses must align with evolving compliance standards. Managing this can become challenging as data volume increases and regulations change.

Case Studies: Successful Automation Implementations

Here are some examples of successful security automation implementations.

• Incident response: With low-code or no-code security automation, your team can build automated workflows quickly to handle incident response. An automated incident response could look like a workflow that instantly pulls GCP activity logs for a compromised user and enrich the incident ticket. Security team members can input parameters in a self-service app, receiving the formatted activity logs via email. This improves response time and makes sure data reaches the right person. Additionally, organizations can customize workflows by adding actions or conditional subflows.
• Identity and access management (IAM): No-code platforms in tandem with IAM enable teams to manage user authentication and authorization for secure and efficient access control. In the case of suspicious user activity, teams can automatically detect and manage a login attempt at two remote locations using Okta. Security teams could automatically notify users via Slack, asking them to confirm or deny the activity. If denied, the system would instantly lock the user in Okta and alert the security team to take suspension actions quickly to mitigate risk.
• Governance, risk, and compliance (GRC): Using appropriate security automation tools, your GRC teams can monitor and manage common compliance issues. This looks like ensuring continuous SOC 2 compliance for an organization's AWS environment. Here, the automated security system automatically generates reports covering SOC 2 common criteria, availability, and privacy standards. These reports highlight compliance gaps and are emailed to key stakeholders for review. Afterward, the automation is scheduled weekly so the company can remain compliant without manual effort. This reduces audit preparation time and improves security posture.

Wrapping Up

Proper implementation of security automation is crucial. Implementing best practices such as continuous monitoring and reporting, and identifying processes suitable for automation, can help your team deal with complex and emerging cyber threats.

BlinkOps offers unmatched speed and efficiency when automating your security processes. By leveraging BlinkOps, you can stay ahead of emerging threats with seamless workflows using natural language and a user-friendly interface. Want to dive deeper? Read our e-book about security automation best practices and take your security strategy to the next level.

This post was written by Kelechi Ugwu. Kelechi is a passionate and versatile Software Engineer and Technical Writer. As a technical writer, he has a love for crafting innovative digital solutions and communicating complex technical concepts in a clear and engaging manner. His writing style emphasizes clarity, consistency, and user-centricity, making it easier for developers and stakeholders to understand and adopt the technology.