Many IT automation and orchestration discussions focus on using pipelines that enable continuous integration/continuous delivery to improve IT productivity and efficiency. While these pipelines benefit service and software development, they can also bolster an organization's security posture.
It's helpful to frame security automation discussions by using the CIA triad. The triad consists of the following three aspects:
Confidentiality. Enforcing resource access to only authorized users.
Integrity. Ensuring data does not unexpectedly change.
Availability. Guaranteeing services, applications and data are available to authorized users.
The CIA triad provides context to security discussions. It's helpful for cybersecurity planning, practices and maintenance. In this case, it helps demonstrate how security automation benefits organizations.
Challenges of manual intervention
Let's begin with the challenges inherent in manual IT security configuration and monitoring.
Modern IT infrastructures are typically too large, too diverse and too distributed to permit efficient and effective manual management. Today's environments include on-premises physical and virtual devices running Linux and Windows, as well as hybrid and multi-cloud deployments across Amazon, Microsoft and Google platforms. While these placements offer significant benefits in scalability, cost-effectiveness and security, they also introduce a level of complexity that prohibits manual security processes.
Consider the following challenges of manual security management:
Human error due to overlooked settings, unfamiliar or new features, and inconsistent configuration across multiple physical locations, which could result in confidentiality and integrity issues.
Misconfiguration of security settings through human error, unrecognized default settings and inconsistent management, leading to availability and confidentiality issues.
Improper authorization and access controls resulting from default settings or misapplied permissions, creating potential confidentiality and integrity issues.
Time required to manage security configurations manually, resulting in availability issues.
Scalability and agility challenges due to limited administrator resources and inefficient manual processes, leading to confidentiality and availability issues.
Difficulties in providing consistent monitoring and pattern recognition to identify potential security incidents, leading to confidentiality, integrity and availability issues.
How to use automation to address these challenges
Automation and orchestration provide speed, consistency and coverage. Improving an organization's security posture helps prevent security incidents, while automated detection and remediation processes help reduce their impact when they do occur.
Automation and orchestration provide speed, consistency and coverage. Improving an organization's security posture helps prevent security incidents, while automated detection and remediation processes help reduce their impact when they do occur.
The following use cases demonstrate how automation addresses the concerns outlined by the CIA triad.
Automation eliminates human error and inconsistency
As with other configuration management aspects of IT, automation helps reduce the risk of human error and provides an unparalleled level of consistency to settings for servers, end-user workstations, network appliances and other devices in on-premises and cloud deployments. This results in a better overall security posture.
Uniform settings offer a high degree of predictability and are much quicker to update in response to new threats. Automation also enables improved patch management, keeping devices and software up to date with the latest security and feature improvements.
Each of these concerns impacts the confidentiality, integrity and availability of applications, services and data.
Automation reduces misconfigurations
Automated processes excel at detecting and remediating configuration drift, addressing misconfigurations to avoid leaving vulnerabilities open for malware and data breaches. Continuous monitoring enables incidents to be detected in a timely manner. If automated processes cannot remediate the issues, they can at least alert administrators who can address the problem and ensure confidential data isn't lost.
Automation responds to incidents faster
Automated processes respond more quickly to security incidents, closing the gap between detection and correction. Organizations that enable AI-based security and automated processes to remediate cybersecurity incidents upon detection have a stronger security posture.
Security automation not only improves incident response times, but can also reconfigure devices more quickly in the event of new security concerns or zero-day vulnerabilities. For example, suppose a zero-day vulnerability is discovered in Windows Servers, affecting 100 of an organization's servers. Automated responses can patch these systems far more quickly than manual configuration management could.
Automation improves scalability
Organizations must be able to quickly scale up resources, including containers and VMs, to meet today's application deployments and user availability demands. Plenty of attention is given to automating these deployments, enabling environments to respond immediately to changes in workload demand. Automating security configurations for these scaled deployments is just as necessary.
Automated processes could include the following:
Adding new security settings to containers and ensuring these platforms remain current with security settings.
Adding new security configurations to VMs, protecting OSes and applications from threats in new deployments.
Updating configuration files for network devices, such as switches, routers and firewalls.
Automation improves resilience
Automated deployment pipelines and self-healing features combine to improve service and application resilience and availability. Environments can recover from failures more quickly. Among key benefits are the following:
Drift detection helps prevent misconfigurations that leave security holes open.
Continuous hardening improves reactions to new threats.
Quicker incident containment.
Improved automated alerts and responses.
Improved availability is a significant component of a comprehensive security posture.
Automation improves security posture
An agile, automated security infrastructure lets security professionals quickly deploy and modify all aspects of the CIA triad across large environments. Advantages include the ability to do the following:
Apply and consistently enforce access controls.
Update systems to mitigate threats.
Match and enforce compliance settings.
Security automation accomplishes these tasks at scale and with little human effort. The quick application of settings, combined with the ability to change or update configurations immediately, supports the dynamic security posture modern organizations require.
Automation improves threat detection and remediation
Automation's capabilities around faster responses, contextual incident reporting, consistency and continuous monitoring make it a core component of threat detection and remediation.
It offers specific advantages in the following areas:
Automated tools ingest, analyze and correlate logs across the entire deployment infrastructure, identifying anomalies and indicators of compromise.
Automated tools provide 24/7 coverage and do not suffer from alert fatigue.
Incident response tools and security orchestration, automation and response utilities automatically add actionable information to alerts, including threat intel, asset details and incident context. These features provide human responders with a far more complete picture of the alert than a log file entry can.
Automated mappings of threats to playbooks reduce inconsistent incident response and improve detection-to-decision reaction times.
We all know automation improves efficiency. When adopted for security use cases, automation enables security teams to spend more time researching, understanding and combating threats. Using the CIA triad to frame security automation illustrates how organizations can structure their approach to mitigate risks and threats.
Damon Garn owns Cogspinner Coaction and provides freelance IT writing and editing services. He has written multiple CompTIA study guides, including the Linux+, Cloud Essentials+ and Server+ guides, and contributes extensively to Informa TechTarget, The New Stack and CompTIA Blogs.
