Build an Automation Roadmap to Streamline Security Processes
You can’t defend against today’s automated attacks with slow and manual processes.
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- Automating security operations solves all kinds of challenges, from decreasing incident detection times to increasing the productivity of your talented staff. But implementing automation itself is fraught with its own challenges that stall these initiatives before they even start:
- CISOs and information security departments don’t know where to start with automation – there seem to be simply too many processes that could be automated. Which ones go first?
- Teams understand that there are missing requirements such as necessary tools and training, but it’s difficult to get the buy-in needed to address these prerequisites before actually automating any tasks.
Save time and risk by automating your security processes
- Follow Info-Tech’s approach to developing a security automation roadmap that not only includes the initiatives for increasing your automation maturity, but also includes all the initiatives that serve as the critical dependencies for making automation more of a reality.
- Discover all your existing security processes, using our list of common processes as a starting point.
- Assess your current automation maturity, as well as your vision for those processes.
- Define their suitability, value, risk, and feasibility for automation – narrowing down what is possible to automate today as well as what could be further done in future iterations.
Book Your Workshop
Onsite Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn’t enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our Project Workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a road map in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Define Goals, Processes, and Assess Maturity
The Purpose
- Align business goals to automation outcomes. Identify the current state and target state of automation within your existing security processes.
- Identify the current state and target state of automation within your existing security processes.
Key Benefits Achieved
An understanding of where automation is used in the organization today and where it should be improved, as well as how to measure the success of those efforts.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 1.1 | Define your organization’s goals for automation |
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| 1.2 | Discover and itemize your security use cases |
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| 1.3 | Assess the maturity of your security processes |
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| 1.4 | Identify the target state for each process |
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Module 2: Assess Suitability, Value, and Risk of Automation
The Purpose
- Identify where automation may have roadblocks relating to suitability, value, or risk.
Key Benefits Achieved
Gain an understanding of where automation is being blocked because of a lack of documentation or manual hand-offs. Further determine if automation would be of no value, or add too much risk in some cases.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 2.1 | Assess the automation suitability of your security processes |
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| 2.2 | Assess the value and risk of adding more automation to your use cases |
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| 2.3 | Determine the initiatives to address suitability or value/risk challenges |
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Module 3: Assess Automation Feasibility, and Finalize Initiatives
The Purpose
- Determine if the necessary prerequisites exist to implement automation – centered around technology, training, and buy-in.
Key Benefits Achieved
Identify where automation is being halted because of prerequisite requirements, such as a SOAR platform, or knowledge of a scripting or modeling language. Identify the initiatives needed to close those gaps.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 3.1 | Assess the feasibility of adding more automation to your use cases |
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| 3.2 | Determine the initiatives to address feasibility challenges |
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Module 4: Prioritize Initiatives and Build the Automation Roadmap
The Purpose
- With all the initiatives on the list, assess their impact and effort, and use that tension to prioritize them into execution waves.
Key Benefits Achieved
An impact analysis helps you look at the big picture and determine how to get the most throughput out of your automation initiatives.
| Activities: | Outputs: | |
|---|---|---|
| 4.1 | Align the automation initiatives to business goals |
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| 4.2 | Assess the effort and cost of each initiative |
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| 4.3 | Prioritize and sequence the initiatives into appropriate waves |
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| 4.4 | Finalize the Automation Roadmap |
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