IT security professionals: Stop hemorrhaging time

As we have all been told from an early age, time is money. For every second professionals are mired in administrative tasks rather than using the skills they were hired for, human capital is exuding needlessly.

Every industry struggles with challenges related to workforce management, but in information security, the problem has reached critical mass. For example, a recent survey from the Ponemon Institute revealed that the average enterprise receives a staggering 10,000 security alerts a day according to research from Damballa.

Recouping that wasted productivity requires more than a tweak to current security practices; a completely new approach is necessary. Automated security operations, for example, can significantly reduce the time security information workers spend sifting through high-volume, low complexity tasks. But as the aforementioned survey discovered, only 41 percent of organizations currently have automated response tools.

A security automation and orchestration platform can centralize all alerts from every tool in a single location and enrich from a variety of internal and external sources such as configuration databases or threat intelligence. Through an organization’s own internal, proven processes, the platform is then able to either:

1. Automatically resolve the alert
2. Recommend a course of action so that even the most junior member of an IT team can address the issue, leaving the most experienced employees to handle the most complex tasks

How many alerts does your security team deal with on a daily basis? Even if the number is lower than the average 10,000, chances are your team is overrun with more than it can realistically handle manually without sacrificing productivity or thoroughness. Currently, 35 percent of enterprises spend more than 500 hours a month reviewing security alerts, according to research conducted by IDC. That number, however, can be significantly reduced with automated security operations.

So consult with your team members and find out if they feel overwhelmed—and hurry up, because time is wasting.