An American poet once wrote about reaching a fork in the road and he considered which path to take.    When one attempts to consider branching logic and automation in complex technical systems, there is a lot of consideration given to which path to take.

There may be lessons to be learned from Robert Frost’s 25-line masterpiece.    

Today’s discussion is with Thomas Kinsella, Chief Customer Officer and Co-founder of a company that focuses on improving automation.  It is appropriately called Tines. 

Thomas Kinsella was asked to discuss a typical day in the life of a person working in a Security Operations Center, or SOC.  He describes it as a plethora of alerts, new data, and disjointed tools. 

His description of the SOC was kind of like One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The story is almost as monotonous as a Soviet era gulag, although the remuneration may be slightly higher.

Thomas Kinsella describes issues with alert fatigue, difficulty of finding good staff, and incompatible systems that make duplicative works. He and his co-founder decided to come up with a better solution, they founded Tines.

During the interview Thomas Kinsella describes how they have been able to use technology to assemble data from a variety of sources. This was to address the idea of alert fatigue, if an incident was possibly confirmed, then it should be pursued.

Secondly, the way to address staff shortage was to design a visually based system so that an untrained individual could drag and drop actions into a sequence.  In fact, Tines provides playbooks for many scenarios in a secure environment, he calls them playbooks. 

The result is a system that can produce a Secure Orchestration Automation and Response system that is easy to use, scalable, and doesn’t need the expertise of a PhD. in computer science.

For more on Tines, please read the blog “Cybersecurity in 2024: Five Predictions from our co-founders”

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