Intelligent Automation: The New Cybersecurity Essential – 107.180.56.147

Guest editorial by Zac Amos, Features Editor at ReHack Magazine

Reliable cybersecurity is often a matter of capitalizing on the latest technologies.

As cyber threats grow in number and severity, organizations must take advantage of every resource to stay safe.

Intelligent automation is one of the most critical of these resources today.

Automation as a whole has seen impressive adoption across industries and processes. However, cybersecurity remains comparatively under-automated, with just 37% of organizations automating key security processes. Businesses must close that gap to stay secure in the current security environment.

Intelligent automation is a broad category, but it generally involves using artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic process automation (RPA) to automate and optimize various processes. Combining RPA’s efficiency and workload reduction with AI’s continuous improvement makes automation more versatile and effective.

Intelligent automation has applications across five main sectors in the cybersecurity industry, ranging from incident response to certificate management. Specific applications within these sectors include automated network monitoring, simulating attacks, automatic compliance, and attribute-based access control.

In these use cases, intelligent automation accelerates and refines processes where manual alternatives may be slow or inaccurate. Because these technologies learn from increased data and experience over time, they become more effective the longer you use them.

(See how the story of work started a long time ago, on a Monday… As people got better at work, they built tools to work more efficiently, they even built computers to work smarter, but still, they couldn’t do enough work! The more work they did, the more work they created, and not the good kind. One day a very smart person figured out how to put the fun back in work, this is their story… Courtesy of UiPath and YouTube.)

Many businesses may already recognize intelligent automation’s potential but still lag in adoption, often from skepticism over returns or concerns over technological complexity.

However, security automation is no longer an advantage but a necessity. Here’s why.

Threats Are Growing Too Quickly

Much of the need for intelligent automation in cybersecurity stems from cybercrime’s rapid growth. Digital threats are evolving too quickly for manual security controls to keep up.

Part of that is because cybercriminals are already making extensive use of AI and automation, leaving security teams outnumbered and outgunned.

Cybercriminals’ AI adoption means attacks are becoming increasingly common and sophisticated. Security forces need a similar speed of innovation to stay safe, and manually keeping pace with this trend is virtually impossible.

Organizations need ongoing improvements of AI and the efficiency of RPA to keep on top of these developing attacks.

There Aren’t Enough Security Specialists

Compounding this issue is the ongoing shortage of IT and security workers. The cybersecurity industry faces a workforce gap of 3.4 million employees, despite the sector employing more workers than ever.

As businesses continue to hire and retain security specialists, it’ll become increasingly difficult to keep up with rising threats.

The skills gap also creates a dangerous cycle where fewer workers lead to increased workloads, creating burnout, driving employees away, leading to higher breaches, and so on.

Given that cycle, companies can’t expect to address this issue with human employees alone. Intelligent automation can reduce manual workloads to prevent burnout and help teams mitigate more threats despite having fewer available workers.

(Get the inside track on how the lack of cyber skills affects you, your team, and your organization. Courtesy of Mandiant and YouTube.)

People Make Mistakes

Even if you can retain a large enough security force to manage your workloads manually, manual processes are prone to error.

More than half of workers under 30 have made mistakes while working remotely, and 43% of employees have made errors leading to cybersecurity repercussions.

Many security processes — like network monitoring and threat detection — are repetitive, data-heavy, and tedious. That kind of work makes it easier for even experienced employees to make critical errors out of tiredness, distraction, or boredom, especially with stressful workloads.

By contrast, intelligent automation delivers the same accuracy and speed every time, minimizing false positives and negatives.

AI Delivers Proven Results

As more businesses have embraced security automation, the difference it makes has become more evident. Data shows AI and automation effectively mitigate cyber threats, an advantage that’s growing increasingly difficult to overlook.

IBM’s 2022 Cost of a Data Breach report quantified these benefits. It found organizations with a mature AI and automation program identified breaches 28 days faster than those without this technology, saving $3.05 million on average.

Those savings were the largest of any strategy or technology, and even partially deployed AI programs resulted in improvements over entirely manual processes.

Cybercrime has grown too large and complex for humans to defend against, especially amid ongoing talent shortages. As the cost of these attacks increases, the imperative to embrace intelligent automation becomes all the more urgent.

Intelligent automation provides the speed, accuracy, and workload reduction teams need to maximize their security resources.

If you can successfully deploy these technologies, you can remain safe from modern threats, potentially saving millions of dollars.

About the Author

Zac Amos is a tech writer specializing in AI and automation applications in cybersecurity.

His work has been featured on DZone, the Global Cybersecurity Alliance, Unite.AI, and more, and he is also the Features Editor at ReHack. Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn to read his latest articles.

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• The UiPath platform increases the workflow efficiency of companies, empowering them to become more profitable and productive.

• UiPath achieved In Process status from the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) in April 2022, enabling its end-to-end automation platform to be used to securely and transparently process data, speed operations, empower government workers, and improve the customer experience for the public—a top priority of the current White House administration.

• UiPath automation is built upon six categories: discover, build, manage, run, engage, and deliver, and through the UiPath Automation Cloud, companies can instantly begin accessing SaaS robots, choosing between VM Automation Cloud Robot or Serverless Automation Cloud Robot, and removes the need for companies to use their own cloud or physical infrastructure.

• Importantly, every UiPath service is in scope for SOC 2, and Automation Cloud HIPAA attestation also helps organizations adopt UiPath cloud confidently.

(What is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)? Learn how automation software can end repetitive tasks and make digital transformation a reality. Courtesy of UiPath and YouTube.)

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