Even if some people believe that robots and automation will replace the entire workforce and machines will do everything for us, the truth is that automation helps us to be more productive and work more efficiently. It relieves us from the most tedious and monotonous tasks in our daily work and lives.

Automation is already all around us. There's little to nothing we haven't found a way to automate. We have robot vacuums cleaning our homes, there is no way to remember the last time we had to leave our house to pay bills, many of us now use voice-to-text typing, and self-driving cars are going mainstream.

Automation has found its way into every environment, from industries to daily administrative tasks. If we found a way to automate the mere typing of words, we naturally found a way to **automate low-level, repetitive, and time-consuming security tasks**.

Hackers waste no time trying to access devices and networks to steal information, exploit application vulnerabilities, even launch ransomware attacks. Likewise, we shouldn't be wasting our own time with tedious, repetitive security tasks and manually analyzing and responding to each and every alert and incident.

Many security tasks can be automated, and in turn made more time-effective, leaving time for security teams to work on deeper analysis and higher-level tasks. Security monitoring, detection and incident response, among other tasks, can be automated and frequently are.

Before we go deeper into security automation tools, let's start with what security automation is, what it means in the current threat landscape, how to get the most out of automation, and more.

What is security automation?

Security automation is the **automatic execution of security tasks without human intervention**. This includes any security action involved with detecting, analyzing, preventing or remediating cyber threats that is automated, therefore, machine-based and contributes to the overall organization's security posture and plays an active, or better yet, proactive role in future security strategies.

Before automation, many tedious security tasks were performed by practitioners and analysts who went through numerous alerts, analyzed, and decided whether and how to respond to them.

With security automation, security teams are now equipped with a solution that can work for them and take on all the security tasks that took time from security professionals. Valuable time that could be used for involvement in more strategic activities and work on proactive security measures.

There are a few signs that tell us a security task should be automated:

**Repetitive, everyday tasks**: Routine tasks that are done on a daily or otherwise regular basis, such as going through security alerts and analyzing them to differentiate between false positives and genuine alerts and potential threats.

**Tiresome, monotonous tasks**: Security tasks that always follow a similar set of rules and steps. For example, a security incident involving a flagged email and a potential phishing attempt would require analysts to manually check URLs, check domain owner information, IP geolocation, etc.

**Time-consuming tasks**: Security tasks such as correlating data and finding patterns in collected data can take up a lot of time and that time can be invaluable in uncovering suspicious activity before any real attacks happen.

What are the benefits of security automation?

In general, security automation has been predominantly utilized by SOC teams and security teams for quite some time. Its introduction addresses a couple of key challenges these teams face—best reflected through the benefits it has brought them.

Combats alert fatigue

Over the past several years, we've added a lot of detection tools and monitoring technologies to our workflows. Keeping in mind the amount of tools, the attack surface they monitor and the number of security incidents these tools respond to, many of which are just false ...