Automation offers your customers great opportunities to improve security

Many IT decision-makers in small and medium sized businesses will be distressed when a major ransomware infection hits the news again. “What if this happens to us… They prefer not to think about it. The huge growth in networks, applications and users has made the IT environment more complex and inefficient than ever, while cybercriminals strike at lightning speed.

The more complex the infrastructure, the more difficult it is to implement the right security measures. And so organizations continue to implement new standalone security solutions that may have a small impact in the short term, but only increase complexity in the long term.

Automating security measures

The aforementioned proliferation has resulted in IT and security professionals spending too much time on support activities on a daily basis. Research by security vendor Juniper Networks shows that, in the eyes of security professionals, automation can lead to major productivity gains.

For example, more than half (54%) of the employees surveyed believe that automation should simplify the detection of potential threats and the rapid activation of blocks.

What tasks could your customers automate?

As mentioned before, finding competent security professionals is quite a challenge for your customers. And once they have found someone, they want to be able to use this person as efficiently as possible on tasks that have a major impact on the company.

By automating time-consuming repetitive tasks, your customers can save a lot of valuable time (and therefore money). Some of these tasks are:

• Monitoring and detection
• Data collection
• Data analysis
• Incident response

What benefits does an automated security architecture offer?

Automation increases efficiency and speed of tasks, reduce human error and increase the ROI (return on investment) of an investment. Within security applications, this is no different.

But there are more possibilities. By automating it is possible to apply smart technologies such as artificial intelligence, big data analytics and machine learning.

The great strength of AI in security is that data can be structured efficiently so that suspicious behavior can be seen even faster. As a result, zero-day attacks (attacks that break out on the same day as a data breach is detected) can also be detected quickly.

Human brain indispensable

Automation and the use of intelligent software can therefore compensate to some extent for the lack of security professionals. Afraid of becoming completely superfluous in the future, IT professionals do not yet have to, in order to assess the real seriousness of a threat, the human brain is still indispensable.