Globally, data is growing at an exponential rate. Due to factors like information explosion and the rising interconnectivity of endpoints, data growth will only become a more pressing issue. This enormous influx of data will invariably affect security teams.

Faced with an enormous amount of data to sift through, analysts are feeling the crunch. Subsequently, alert fatigue is already a problem for analysts overwhelmed with security tasks. With the continued shortage of qualified staff, organizations are looking for automation to reduce overhead costs and improve productivity.

The Cost of a Data Breach 2022 report by IBM found that organizations equipped with fully deployed security artificial intelligence (AI) and automation saved an average of $3.05 million during a breach compared to those without these tools. Additionally, companies with fully deployed security AI and automation experienced a 74-day shorter time to identify and contain a breach on average.

Organizations now face a crucial challenge: efficiently dealing with the data tsunami and protecting what matters while keeping costs low.

3 ways security automation benefits businesses

Let’s explore some ways in which organizations can make use of cybersecurity automation to overcome the challenges mentioned above.

1. Security automation enables near real-time detections, keeping businesses safe.

With security automation, human analysts no longer have to perform the tedious task of sifting through alerts manually. Instead, AI-driven endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions automate detection and response, enabling businesses to respond automatically. This solves the problem of the “human bottleneck”, as detections can be done in near real-time with automation.

Real-time detections are essential to stop attacks at the onset and prevent further damage from occurring throughout the infrastructure. This is especially critical because the speed of attacks is accelerating.

Furthermore, AI-powered endpoint security is not reliant on malware signatures. It protects endpoints by terminating malicious processes, such as ransomware behaviors, in a matter of seconds. With automation, organizations can track the techniques of an attack as it happens, minimizing the risks of losing important data.

Immediate attack identification and automated response can be the difference between successfully stopping an attack and a compromised organization that has to perform costly cleanup and recovery processes.

2. Security automation eases the analysts’ workload without needing extra personnel.

Intelligent automation captures and groups data into one condensed high-fidelity alert, eliminating the need to manually look through hundreds of alerts streaming in from various sources. By presenting only the necessities and filtering out the “noise”, automation enables analysts to understand an attack at a glance and respond efficiently.

With automation, even a novice analyst can handle threats effectively. Features like guided remediation and single-click remote kill can remediate threats quickly. Automated threat hunting also allows analysts to maintain a threat-free environment, even without database query knowledge, by utilizing readily available search parameters.

3. Security automation increases virtual headcount.

A modern, AI-powered EDR solution acts as a cyber assistant for the human analyst, adding virtual headcount to organizations. By deploying security automation, algorithms can oversee the tedious job of alert management. As a result, this eases alert fatigue for analysts, drastically reducing the volume of false positives.

Breakthrough automation, like one-shot learning, helps organizations by simplifying threat handling. AI-powered automation learns from the human analyst’s decisions and applies these learnings automatically in the future, even if a given alert is seen only once. Training and retraining costs are also kept low, as knowledge is retained with machine learning even with employee turnover.

In this way, intelligent automation effectively saves time for the analysts, freeing them to focus on higher level investigations and other security tasks. Security teams benefit from an increased return on investment, boosted team efficiency and improved alert accuracy.

Putting the analyst back in control

With the continuous growth of data, there will be a tipping point where the human analyst becomes overwhelmed. As attacks become more targeted and sophisticated, security teams must sift through significantly higher amounts of data to find anomalies.

To address this trend, security automation must occur at the endpoints, as this is where many attacks occur. As these attacks have become increasingly automated themselves, they leave analysts with little time to respond.

By deploying intelligent automation, organizations can build an evolving baseline to future-proof endpoints against new threats, stay on top of workloads and keep costs low.

Are you looking for an effective EDR tool but unsure how to pick the right one for your business? Download the IBM Security QRadar EDR Buyer’s Guide to find out more.