Whether streamlining sales processes or developing applications at a faster pace, digitized workflows benefit modern enterprises across many important business domains. However, cybersecurity is an exception that still depends on manually coordinating between data, people and tools and strenuously pushing forwards risk-reduction actions across the organization.
Modern security teams spend much of their time manually operating risk reduction workflows. This operation involves coordinating a growing list of disparate security tools to work together harmoniously and pushing remediation tasks across the organization. Setting rules and even coding scripts to integrate everything and connect the dots between disparate tools and teams takes a lot of effort and time. Compounding the problem is the friction that results from scattered workflows across different security initiatives, programs, and teams. The lack of cohesion and orchestration in the risk reduction workflow landscape within an organization makes it difficult for security professionals to get things done. Adding value to your company’s security posture becomes more difficult when friction dominates over cohesive, integrated workflows. Whether it’s securing the cloud, sanitizing data, remediating vulnerabilities, or managing digital certificate lifecycles, tracking all these security workflows with sufficient transparency is impractical in the current landscape. For your security team to excel, there’s a pressing need for smarter workflows with more automation, better integration, and clearer KPIs.
Here are three things you should consider when looking for a workflow platform for your security team:
1. It’s Time for No-Code Automation
Automation without code provides a powerful way to digitize cybersecurity workflows. You need your security experts to spend their time strengthening and defending your security posture in real-time instead of handling time-intensive workflow management tasks. This can only happen when those tasks are handled automatically. Codeless automation uses out-the-box workflows for common risk reduction use cases. The plug and play nature of it facilitate seamless integration between different tools, teams and workflows. All of this should be accessible from a central user interface with the ability to granularly track KPIs for different workflows from one place. The codeless aspect is critical because if teams still need extensive coding to maintain or update workflows, they’re still going to end up bogged down by manual tasks. You don’t want a situation where switching to a different CSPM solution necessitates manually updating all your security workflows. Your teams need seamless functionality that gets security operation workflows running coherently with the same speed and efficiency as other departments. Security professionals should spend the bulk of their time on strategic planning and conducting deeper investigations for genuine threats.
2. Generic Workflows won’t suffice
Security expertise is critical for an automated security workflow tool to add value. Generic workflow tools won’t suffice because they aren’t built on a solid foundation with security knowledge at the core. In order to gain value for your risk reduction efforts from an automated workflow platform, the following capabilities are required:
- Normalization of findings —A generic workflow with no security expertise would at most be able to ingest findings from different tools within their original format. This doesn’t help move efforts forwards. In order to be able to efficiently drive risk down, security teams must be able to look at one normalized coherent list of security findings – with standardized severity scores and in a single format.
- Organizational knowledge —Confusion over who needs to take ownership of a remediation task and what assets are impacted is a significant barrier to the swift remediation of security findings. Organizational knowledge built into workflows enables your business to easily and dynamically map tasks to owners and assets in an automated way for optimized decision-making.
- Actionable remediation items— With a deep understanding of security findings, multiple weaknesses can be turned into precise remediation actions. Through deduplication and grouping of multiple findings with the same action and/or the same owner the huge influx of findings can be reduced into actionable items. This level of know-how digits findings into bite-sized actions, increasing efficiency significantly.
3. The Value of Customization
Every business has different needs, priorities, and idiosyncrasies that pre-built workflows can’t fully capture. A cornerstone element of digitizing cybersecurity workflows is customization. Fully customizable workflow profiles can make room for different rules depending on the user, process, or data source. Your security teams can use customization to focus on what matters most in securing infrastructure and information.
It’s time to rethink your security workflows
An automated workflow solution modernizes security and brings it up to the standards of efficiency and agility expected by businesses. Customization provides the flexibility to build workflows in line with your unique security posture. Now is the time to digitize your security workflows.