When it comes to protecting their organizations, security teams are ready to respond quickly and efficiently to any threat and spend their days shoring up their security posture and focusing on high-impact work. Or, rather, that’s what security teams hope they can do on a daily basis.
Instead, much of a security analyst’s time is spent chasing false positives,, or any number of other mundane, repetitive tasks. These tasks are necessary but take an analyst’s focus away from higher-impact investigations that can really protect their organization — and too much time spent on mundane tasks can lead to disengagement and burnout if repetitively performed most of the day, every day.
In my fifteen years as a security practitioner and managing security teams, I was always looking for tools to help them do their best work. Automation can help lower the burden of repetitive tasks, but too often, not knowing code or getting a developer involved prevents that workflow from getting successfully automated. But there’s a solution. No-code automation not only removes the barrier of coding when it comes to creating automated workflows, it can free analysts up to focus on proactively protecting their organizations. If you’re just now learning about no-code automation or are looking for ways to improve your usage, here are a few benefits and best practices for your security team.
The benefits of no-code automation
The challenge of repetitive, tedious tasks taking up an analyst’s time is not just a few tasks a day for a few people. According to our recent report on the “Voice of the SOC Analyst,” most analysts are spending between half and three-quarters of their day on tedious tasks, and the most frustrating part of their job is “spending time on manual work.”
If you’re looking for better ways to automate your tasks, look to no-code automation, which doesn’t require analysts to know a programming language. With no-code automation, analysts can build automated workflows by dragging-and-dropping actions into a sequence, like using individual bricks to construct a house. And with no-code automation at their fingertips, analysts can automate what they want, and how they want and have it run when they want.
No-code automation helps solve alert overwhelm, too. Analysts spend much of their days responding to alerts — as many as 840 alerts per day — and more often than not those alerts are false positives, pulling analysts down a time-consuming trail of investigation that leads nowhere. With no-code automation, analysts can automate alert responses, or gather more information about that alert before a human ever gets involved.
With no-code automation’s flexibility and intuitive interface, it can also be used across your organization as well. With no requirement to know how to write code, other teams can utilize the benefits of automating their workflows. You will likely see it become a cross-departmental tool, effective in mission-critical environments.
Another benefit that can’t be too overlooked? Automating monotonous and repetitive tasks means that analysts can turn their skills and talents to work that’s more impactful and stimulating — which improves their job satisfaction. Higher satisfaction leads to higher engagement and retention rates, which is a benefit considering that demand exceeds supply when it comes to security talent these days.
Best practices for no-code adoption
If you’re just getting started with your no-code automation platform or are looking for ways to be more effective with it, the following five practices can help your team become more impactful and proactive.
Annotate so everyone learns: As your team begins building workflows, have them annotate what they’re building by adding notes throughout on how they built it and why. This can help other team members see how the workflows were constructed, and tweak those practices later if needed.
Modularize familiar steps: As they build workflows, your team will find themselves circling back to the same steps, like following up about a notification via Slack. Take note of those repeated steps and modularize them for easier use later on.
Get a human involved: The good thing about automation is that while it runs itself, it can still pull a human into the loop when needed to make important judgment calls. Build monitoring into the process, so that if something fails, someone gets notified.
Continue to iterate: Automated workflows require maintenance and upkeep — but once your team members begin creating automated workflows, imagination is the limit. Continue to analyze and improve upon workflows to make things more efficient or more streamlined.
Keep track of the value: Don’t forget to communicate the value of your no-code automation to leadership. Implementing no-code automation will not only increase your time to value, it will save you costs as well. Track and communicate all of that to leadership so that they can better understand and get behind your security team’s contribution.
Preparing for your organization’s security future
When it comes to protecting your organization, ensure that your security team is ready to respond quickly and efficiently to any threat and that they’re spending their days building up their security posture and focusing on high-impact work. Adopting no-code automation and utilizing these best practices will help set you up for future success and less stress.
