The weight on their shoulders

When considering the state of critical incidents in 2019 – it’s no surprise that looking ahead to 2020, CISOs have one of the organization’s most challenging and stressful jobs. 

During the first half of the year alone 4.1 billion records were compromised, and the average cost of a data breach is now estimated at $3.92 million.

Moreover, with the growing proliferation of large scale digital transformations, blockchain, 5G, and IoT-enabled devices, which are expected to reach 75 billion by 2025 – enterprise decision-makers are keenly focused on making sure security investments address digital business risks. And, this onerous responsibility is the weight that rests on the shoulders of the CISO.

The SOC focus for 2020

Among the top strategies identified for helping CISOs carry this weight, hedge such risks, and minimize the impact of incidents is – automation.

According to Gartner one of the top security and risk management trends is the heightened focus of security operations centers (SOC) on threat detection and response, where by 2022, 50% of all SOCs will have integrated incident response with threat intelligence and threat-hunting.

“The need for SRM (security and risk management) leaders to buid or outsource a SOC that integrates threat intelligence, consolidates security alerts and automates response cannot be overstated,” Peter Firstbrook, research vice president at Gartner.

The need for incident response automation is indeed top of mind. In fact, it is said that “orchestration and automation are all the rage,” with CISOs actively seeking to automate response to issues that are detected by Security Orchestration, Automation and Response(SOAR) tools.

The limitations of tradition

Traditionally, in the effort to improve their ability to control a critical incident, the CISO’s organization had been focused on upgrading technology infrastructures.

This approach unfortunately has not been sufficiently effective in addressing the biggest pain point, which lies in actually managing the incident among multiple and often geographically dispersed stakeholders, untangling complex processes, and leveraging data from siloed systems.

Moreover, another challenge comes from the fact that all of these efforts to date have entailed manual processes that are highly prone to error.

Automation for the people

Automation is the key to all this – with the ability to quickly and efficiently gather and onboard stakeholders from across (and from outside) the organization, immediately trigger complex workflows, and seamlessly orchestrate tasks and role assignment, without the need for any human intervention.

This takes a huge burden off the shoulders of the incident first responders and the entire incident team (including – ultimately, the CISO).

No more chasing down the folks that need to weigh in, approve, and execute – saving time on rote tasks and freeing up everyone to take care of the critical issue at hand.

Moreover, when updates can be automatically sent at the right time to the right people, including management – transparency, clarity, and understanding can be achieved like never before.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

At Exigence, we believe that automation is the key to finally making critical incidents controllable and to minimizing the impact they can make on the organization.

Want to learn more about how you can automate incident management and get control, expedite resolution, and hedge the incident risk in 2020 and beyond? We invite you to reach out to us to find out: info@exigence.io.