https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/definition/security-automation
Security automation uses technology to remove high-volume manual processes from security operations to detect cyberthreats, which saves time by integrating different workflows into repeatable processes.
For example, the human process of ingesting and analyzing log data from disparate security devices requires significant time. Security automation eliminates this manual examination, providing immediate ingestion and basic analysis.
Fundamentally, security automation reduces the need for human intervention and speeds up the identification and mitigation of security issues.
Because of its advantages across business activities, security automation is a core element of IT security policy. Benefits include the following:
Across domains and deployment environments, security teams face time-sensitive operational challenges, both on-premises and in the cloud. Security automation proves useful in many areas, including:
Known vulnerabilities are common attack vectors. Security automation scans for vulnerabilities, prioritizes the most dangerous and provides automated patch management across hardware and software assets.
Threats include cyberattacks in any form, including unauthorized access, data exfiltration and prompt injection. Properly set up, security automation continuously scans for these and other threats.
Following threat detection, remediation reduces the total effect as quickly as possible. Security automation executes incident response playbooks that define specific, repeatable and immediate countermeasures.
Security automation is commonly used for automated data classification, the identification of sensitive and personally identifiable information, and the assurance of proper data encryption.
Security automation tools monitor and maintain compliance with various rules and laws, including the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Security automation is a multistep process that begins with understanding the problem and its scope. Security automation typically features the following steps:
1. Inventory current processes. Document and inventory all existing manual security processes and tasks in the organization's workflow.
2. Define objectives. Not every task needs automation. Defining the goals and objectives of any security automation exercise often identifies the most impactful places to begin, from improving compliance reports to reducing the mean time to repair or resolve security incidents.
3. Obtain organizational buy-in. Successful security automation efforts must involve security staff, including SOC analysts and IT staff, as an integral part of the process.
4. Choose the right tools. Using the organization's current processes and established objectives, the next step is to evaluate different security automation tools, ensuring that any choice integrates smoothly with existing processes and technologies.
5. Write playbooks. Document the organization's common security workflows in a playbook. Include responses to different types of common incident response scenarios, such as ransomware or phishing attacks.
6. Deploy and test. With the appropriate tools and playbooks in place, next is an initial deployment and test of different scenarios to evaluate efficacy.
7. Monitor and refine. Security automation processes require regular review to ensure continued effectiveness. Security teams must also update and refine processes and technologies as organizational objectives change in response to emerging threats.
Despite the measurable benefits security automation provides, organizations must be aware of its pitfalls and challenges, which include the following:
Following is a list of practices to consider when deploying security automation:
A security operations center manages and defends an organization's IT security, and security automation brings processing advantages to an SOC in multiple areas, such as the following:
Modern security systems must integrate automation tools and platforms to provide comprehensive protection. While some tools focus on a specific area, there is overlap among categories. They include:
Extended detection and response (XDR) platforms collect different telemetry from endpoints and network devices, delivering automated threat detection and endpoint protection capabilities. XDR automates threat correlations across different devices and provides automated policy enforcement.
Security information and event management (SIEM) systems help organizations to ingest logs and automate log analysis across a distributed computing infrastructure. The automated analysis often includes machine learning (ML) technology to autonomously identify and prioritize risks. SIEMs are also often used to help audit compliance reporting because they continuously monitor logs.
Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) platforms extend the capabilities of SIEM, enabling multiple systems to coordinate an automatic response to threats. SOAR also automates alert triage across different systems, including firewalls, to determine what is and isn't a threat. The system then executes an incident response playbook, which can also span multiple systems, to remediate the issue and improve overall security posture.
Learn what differentiates SOAR from SIEM.
Increasingly included in security automation workflows, vulnerability management tools provide continuous scanning across infrastructure and endpoints to identify services and software that require a patch. The system automatically applies a risk score to unpatched assets and coordinates patch deployment.
Cloud-native application protection platform technology integrates cloud security posture management and cloud workload protection platform capabilities into a single system, providing automated configuration and vulnerability monitoring across cloud environments.
Security automation and security orchestration are closely related concepts. In many respects, security orchestration is a superset of security automation capabilities, delivering automation across several tools instead of only one.
The chart below outlines key differences between security automation and security orchestration:
| Aspect | Security automation | Security orchestration |
| Scope | Executes single, repetitive tasks | Coordinates multistep workflows across tools (e.g., isolates endpoints + revokes access + generates alerts) |
| Primary function | Reduces manual effort for individual actions | Manages interconnected processes across environments |
| Task complexity | Low complexity; follows predefined rules | High complexity; adapts to dynamic conditions (e.g., escalating threats) |
| Integration needs | Works within a single system (e.g., firewall) | Connects multiple platforms -- SIEM, XDR; identity and access management -- via APIs |
| Common use cases |
• Patch deployment • Log analysis • Malware quarantine |
• Incident response playbooks • Compliance audits • Threat intelligence sharing |
Security automation largely began with rules-based responses: When a certain threshold or event occurred, automation triggered another action.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and ML are changing all aspects of IT and already impacting security automation, moving the process beyond a rules-based approach to improve the speed and accuracy of risk analysis.
With AI/ML-powered predictive analytics, security automation promises not only identification and response to risks, but anticipation and prediction of potential threats.
18 Mar 2025