Rapid7
By Jen Andre, Senior Director Orchestration & Automation, Rapid7
Attackers are becoming more sophisticated and coordinated by the day, and even the best security teams are challenged to keep up. How can we get the upper hand? By uniting the many hands across security, IT, and development teams to share data and automate the tools that tie them together. This is the practice of SecOps, and it's vital to making security an inherent part of all business operations. In this post, we'll address the orchestration and automation components of SecOps—and how you can use it to amplify your impact as a security professional.
Orchestration paves the way for collaboration
Instead of technologies continuing to exist in their own silos, a solution that orchestrates—or integrates—disparate tools makes it easier to collaborate across an organization. With coordinated technology, it's easier to accomplish security goals and to have IT, security, and development band together with shared visibility. With Rapid7, there are over 200 prebuilt plugins to leading security tools that make it possible to connect your technologies and processes. The coordination of process is only one part of success; the other piece is the automation that enables an organization to do more with less.
Automation increases speed and lowers risk
Sometimes when people hear the word automation, they get nervous that it means their jobs will be eliminated and they'll become obsolete. The opposite is true. Instead, automation allows you to leave the manual and mundane tasks to machines and then return to make human decisions when most critical. It enables you to do more with less and have more time in your day to focus on your work and innovate.
Imagine a time when, instead of needing to manually find and append data to an alert to get the context you need to make a decision, that context is added automatically (without you needing to code) and all you have to do is the analysis. You can then respond to the business faster and lower risk by being able to respond to an alert in far less time. This is just one of many examples of how automation can save time and lower risk.
Automation to fulfill the SecOps vision
Security orchestration and automation improves maturity and creates better processes no matter the size, shape, or maturity of an organization. The most important part is that the solution works with tools you already have in place and that it's easy to use. Rapid7 provides templates for the most-used process workflows so that your organization can customize these to fit your needs and experience value quickly.
The outcome of implementing security orchestration and automation is a fully connected SecOps organization where teams are aligned around goals, and you are excited about all that you can accomplish with the newfound time.