Having been a security practitioner and head of security teams for over 15 years, I know how crucial it is for your frontline analysts to devote their time to high-impact tasks that can evolve the security stance of your organizationand how frustrating it can be to see them spending most of their time manually reviewing phishing responses, doing tedious log analysis, or performing other low-value tasks.

When no-code automation is properly utilized, your security operations team can have all the benefits of expansive, complex automation without ever having to involve a developer or learn code themselves. Analysts can simply drag-and-drop actions to automate complex workflows.

Based on my experience at the forefront of no-code automation, heres how you can maximize its potential for your team.

What is no-code automation?

Todays frontline security teams need automation to handle complex workflows and organization-specific requirements, often resulting in the need to introduce coding and scripting to solve those needs.

Security analysts, however, dont necessarily have coding skills, requiring them to call in developers who can take weeks or months to create integrations and deploy automations. If an analyst needs an update or addition, they need to get developers involved all over again.

And dont even get me started on the change management process this can involve.

With no-code automation, analysts are able to simply drag-and-drop actions into a workflow, wire them together, set the parameters, test it, and set it loose.

HOW TO LEVERAGE THE POWER OF NO-CODE SECURITY AUTOMATION

Improve time to value.

If youve invested in no-code automation, start by reducing project management needs, communication burdens, unnecessary feedback loops, and other extra steps that can be collapsed with automated workflows. Keep in mind that businesses are getting hit by a cyber attack every 11 seconds, so dont forget to prioritize increasing speed within the SOC.

Improve retention.

Our recent report on the voice of the SOC analyst found that 71% of analysts feel very or somewhat burned out at work, and the number one most frustrating aspect of the job is spending time on manual work.

No one wants to do work thats boring and menial, and analysts who burn out simply leave their jobs. If youve invested in no-code automation, you should use it to automate low-level tasks so security practitioners can focus on what theyre really good at: increasing the security posture of their organization, deploying new technology, improving awareness training, and other high-impact, high-value work.

Reduce the number of mistakes.

Mundane work isnt just bad for humanshumans are bad at it, too. Hours of menial, repetitive work increases the likelihood of error.

One study found that upwards of 49% of human error at work is due to stress, repetition, or fatigue. Automated workflows function deterministically and consistently, reducing false positives and false negatives. No-code automation also reduces error because the analysts who know the workflows the best are the ones actually building the automation.

Create an automation flywheel.

Keep an open mind when it comes to what you can automate. For example, a team member may build a Slack-based chatbot that automates aspects of team process and collaboration, not just the threat intelligence workflow.

In other words, an automation process an analyst builds for a specific purpose might have other applications beyond what they were thinking of when they created it.

Ive discovered that many times, security teams using no-code automation say, Could we do this? and simply build the new workflow, allowing for easier innovation and quicker application.

Improve incident readiness.

Finally, you probably already know that when an incident occurs, every second counts enormously. Thats why its important to get the most critical automations in place as soon as possible so your team is free to turn their attention to the incident. Your automation can help by collecting information and context about that incident in seconds and alerting a human when more critical decision-making is necessary.

Founder atTines, a platform that allows anyone to automate repetitive security workflows without writing a single line of code.

Read this article:

How to leverage the power of no-code security automation - Fast Company