Finding the right security strategy is critical for financial sector organizations. But even the best security methodologies and tools don’t do much good if they can’t scale with the operation. That’s where security automation comes in and allows for repeatable and scalable security processes across the enterprise.
Let’s examine how the right MSP can help clients perfect their approach to designing and deploying security automation, allowing you to scale cybersecurity protections to match even the most aggressive growth curves for your IT operation.
The Importance of Security Automation
Automation is necessary for any organization hoping to operate at scale. The reason for this is that, as companies grow, so does the work of configuring and managing IT operations. Unfortunately, beyond a certain scale, the workload of monitoring and optimizing systems quickly eclipses what’s possible to do manually. Security functions are not immune to this phenomenon; but compared to other enterprise functions, organizations open themselves up to tremendous risk when their security operation breaks down at scale.
When key cybersecurity functions like alert monitoring, threat analysis and vulnerability scanning don’t keep up with the scale of an organization’s IT systems, the resulting security gaps leave the organization vulnerable to ransomware, business email compromise, data exfiltration and other attacks. All the while, compliance is nearly impossible to maintain, resulting in additional negative impacts in the form of reputational damage, regulatory fines and more. That’s why security automation is such a critical piece of the cybersecurity puzzle.
Automated alert management to weed through false positives and duplicative alerts is particularly useful at scale in an era when a typical enterprise can receive more than 11,000 alerts a day. In addition, automated vulnerability scanning can quickly sweep the IT environment for security gaps in applications infrastructure, connectivity and more. There are also self-resolution tools for proactive patching and autonomous resolution of issues. Those are just a few examples in an ever-expanding toolkit of security automation capabilities.
Getting the Most out of Security Automation via MSP Partnership
For all the power of security automation tools, the solutions are not turnkey. A fair amount of customization and ongoing configuration work is required to continually optimize how the security automation solution grows and adapts with your IT architecture and business processes. That’s where the right MSP can help by delivering the technical, analytical and regulatory expertise together in one place to customize a security automation platform for a client’s most demanding use cases.
For instance, automated vulnerability scanning and automated information security scanning both use complex algorithms to do the bulk of discovery and analysis, with only occasional human intervention. The right MSP can ensure the underlying processes are sound before they are automated, and then continually align automated processes with any changes in client-specific security rules around authentication, data access management and more.
The right MSP partner can also leverage the latest threat intelligence and expertise in NIST CSF and other cybersecurity preparedness and response frameworks to configure automated penetration testing systems that simulate black hat and red team exercises. What’s more, an MSP that’s highly knowledgeable in both financial sector and IT compliance can help clients configure automated reporting tools to capture the right information and streamline documentation to demonstrate compliance to regulators.
When it comes to all of these forms of security automation, no MSP is more right for the job than ECI. We embed automation across our product and service offerings, including within our comprehensive Governance & Risk and Compliance (GRC) platform that covers multiple systems. We also use automated frameworks for vendor due diligence to scale security automation across all data, systems, processes and third-party relationships – no matter how large the scale of enterprise operations. Learn more about how ECI can help you get the most out of security automation here.
