Should You Build vs. Buy for Security Automation?

Achieve Your DevSecOps Automation Objectives Faster With Blink

Blink was founded by cybersecurity experts who know firsthand how complex infrastructure operations can be, especially in large, business critical production environments. But, that doesn’t mean all security automation needs a custom build. Many security workflows are common across different organizations, and don’t require bespoke infrastructure. While some cloud professionals choose to build from scratch and use custom code to address operational tasks, those who decide to self-build often run into significant overhead and hidden costs down the road. 

Investing in a no-code security platform like Blink early on can eliminate tedious work by allowing DevSecOps teams to focus only on business critical operational aspects that allow organizations to increase value, scale, and create ongoing operational confidence faster.

Here are the 5 killer features you only get with a no-code automation platform like Blink:

1. Run your automations anywhere

When you custom build your workflows, you’re responsible for supporting every run environment. The opposite is true with a no-code platform like Blink. If you want to run on the cloud, locally, on your infrastructure, or on multiple clusters/servers at the same time — Blink has got you covered. Our “Runner” instance can run anywhere, giving you the ability to run workflows with access to any resource you wish. Blink also enables you to run any automation on any cloud account seamlessly, without hard coupling between the account and the workflow.

Without Blink: Supporting each run environment requires a high amount of labor & development, mostly builders choose to run only locally or only on a single dedicated instance.That means for many organizations, automations are only usable by the developers who build them.
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2. Capture any cloud event

Many automation flows are not initiated manually by a user, but by an event that takes place in another one of the applications in their organization’s stack. To listen to these events, DevSecOps need to learn the ins and outs of every SaaS API to understand how they might be able to listen to relevant events. Users also need to manually implement pagination mechanisms, stateful memory of completed handled events, webhook “challenge” configuration, and other tedious configurations. When using Blink, you’re provided with hundreds of out-of-the-box events and event-based automations that you can use to quickly bootstrap event-based flows.

Without Blink: Creating event-based automations requires dedicated work and research about every platform involved, significantly slowing down automation projects.
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3. SSO authenticated flows

Many modern applications require SSO authentication as part of their security operations workflows. Instead of manually setting up custom SSO authentication, Blink gives you the ability to run API actions using SSO authentication. SSO is labor-intensive to maintain and implement, especially as you integrate multiple platforms together.

Without Blink: You’re  limited to manually implementing API-based authentication only, and must maintain this over time. With Blink, it’s simple adding SSO to your security automations.
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4. Run code, http, linux, no-code, queries — like a pro! 

Sometimes DevSecOps feel limited to writing custom code or running scripts because supporting anything more complex means additional maintenance burden. Whether you want to run no-code actions, access databases, run a full Linux environment, run any type of code, or perform SQL queries against your cloud resources — Blink enables you to do anything in one place with minimal effort. You can use the tool that is best suited to your use case and desired outcome.

Without Blink: Most builders only ever get to run code, as supporting other capabilities is difficult. Blink takes care of the maintenance, so DevSecOps can build the automations your organization really needs.
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5. Use interactive ChatOps flows

Users want to be involved in the process and work with automated flows hand-in-hand, rather than uncontrollable "silent" automations where the user isn't involved at all. With Blink’s ChatOps flows, we can take on the challenge of integrating messaging platforms like Slack, Microsoft Teams, Whatsapp, Telegram, or even email with your SEIM. That’s because you need to solve for authentication of users, RBAC management of each operation exposed through ChatOps, listening to events and responding to them. Blink makes it easy to build ChatOps capabilities into your DevOps and SecOps workflows, such as initiating self-service automations from the chat platform, building interactive "ask a question" actions with the chat platform members, and comes with full API support to help ease this process.

Without Blink: ChatOps capabilities can take a development team months to implement and require constant maintenance. Fewer organizations are able to implement effective ChatOps processes for this reason.
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Automate beyond the SOC with Blink

No-code platforms help your DevSecOps create better security automations, faster.  Get production-grade security workflows that shift-left your security operations — learn how implementing Blink from the start increases your ROI on automation projects.

Schedule a demo today.