Cyberattacks are on the rise - that's a given. With more businesses and other organizations moving towards expanding their security offerings and online defenses, it's no surprise that cybersecurity experts are becoming increasingly in demand. However, as talented as your security operations team may be, the best way to empower them is through automation.

What do Cybersecurity Experts Do?

Let's start with the basics.

Cybersecurity experts are feeling daily pressure when it comes to keeping their organization and its data safe from harm. In this turbulent era, their work involves both, working on the frontlines to combat cyberthreats when they occur as well as toiling behind the scenes to work preventively against potential future threats.

In this regard, the kinds of work these experts handle are both, preventative as well as reactive.

What Skills do Cybersecurity Experts need?

SecOps members need strong problem-solving as well as critical thinking skills to excel at their posts. They also need to rely on several hard skills. Notably, experts in this field are also often coding experts. Knowing the ins and outs of various programming languages helps these professionals assess and patch vulnerabilities, as well as writing their own custom code for various functions.

Some of the more common languages that are used include Python for scripting and automation, C and C++ for data and infrastructure coding, and Java for integrations and webhooks.

What role do they play in your organization?

There are countless use cases for your SecOps team, but one of the most important duties they handle is preventing data breaches.

Data breaches can be the death knell for many companies. Private user information is often very sensitive (such as personal information as well as payment methods, in the case of some businesses) and needs to be made secure.

Data breaches can intentionally arise (a malicious actor enters the system and exports its database) as well as unintentionally (such as an employee losing a company laptop). In either case, when data falls into the wrong hands, it can be harrowing for the users who are affected and the fundamental trust in an organization may take years to restore.

At this very fundamental level, cybersecurity experts are responsible for maintaining the privacy and security of your organization's data and the data with which your clients have entrusted you.

Why Do Cybersecurity Teams Rely on Automation?

In a given day, particularly for larger organizations, there is simply too much data to review, too many factors that can lead to a potential security breach, and too many tasks to be manually performed. Make no mistake - missing alerts or other warnings can have dire consequences. According to a recent post by Colocation, it is estimated that 74% of unverified alerts have the potential to cause serious damage to an organization.

Automation is, therefore, one of the strongest tools that SecOps can rely upon as it streamlines so many of these processes. To give some examples:

• Parsing alerts in order to allow your operators to hone in on more specific events, rather than manually reviewing tons of log files by hand.
• Eliminating unauthorized or suspicious access and access attempts in real-time.
• Automatically handle data enrichment tasks, bundling your info together to make each event more meaningful when reviewed by human operators.
• Updating your organization's growing library of software and apps when patches are released.
• Preventing phishing attacks by analyzing suspected messages against known signatures, and flagging suspicious emails.

In addition, as most organizations do not have the HR bandwidth or funding to hire an entire stable of cybersecurity experts, automation is the cost-efficient way of bolstering your defenses.

In sum, with the right automation in place, organizations can exponentially empower a handful of specialists.

Considering venturing into security automation and building data enrichment processes? Metron has experience integrating multiple SOAR platforms and building custom playbooks that rely on automation.

If you are considering any custom cybersecurity solution that focuses on the resources and needs of your organization, please send a note to connect@metronlabs.com.