When organizations are dealing with a crisis, two of the most valuable attributes they can have are information and time. Unfortunately, many organizations are often most lacking in these two things – especially in times of crisis. When information is not readily accessible and response speeds are slow business continuity, safety, and resilience can be severely impacted.
Adopting automated incident response is a powerful way to ensure rapid action during critical moments—whether facing a cyberattack, geopolitical crisis, or operational disruption. This capability minimizes delays, accelerates data collection, enhances decision-making, and strengthens an organization’s overall security posture.
Why is incident response automation so impactful? By using technology to manage and automate key elements of the incident response process, valuable time is saved! Now, instead of manually searching to pinpoint a data breach or find the root cause of an issue, security teams have technologies to do it for them. Not only does this eliminate lag time that may occur if a crisis occurs in the middle of the night when security leaders might be out of the office (or asleep!), but it gives them the opportunity to focus on complex, high-value decision-making versus manual data collection and related tasks.
Thanks to the invention and proliferation of innovations such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), humans no longer need to be the first responders to a crisis. Instead, the machines have predefined workflows, set by the experts at the organization, that are activated the second a threat is detected. Automated incident response (IR) takes advantage of the speed that machines are capable of to detect, assess, and offer response tactics to analysts. By using technology as a tentpole of their incident management, organizations can greatly accelerate their detection and initial actions for an array of threats such as data breaches, IT outages, local government protests, and even natural disasters. By automating complex incident response workflows, teams can often help contain a threat as automation reduces human error, increases response time. As a result, threats are mitigated and curbed from becoming full blown, organization-wide crises.
The Role of Incident Management Processes in Reducing Response Time
A typical incident management process includes the following steps: detection, triage, escalation, response, and recovery. Let’s break them down.
- Detection: Detection is when an incident is first identified and is the beginning of the IR when teams determine exactly when an event happened. This is the first piece of the puzzle and helps teams hone in on the cause of the issue.
- Triage: At this point, security teams assess the severity and reach of the issue to prioritize its severity. Questions the team will want to ask include: How far-reaching is the issue? How many areas of the business have been affected, are other assets, projects, or people compromised now?
- Escalation: During escalation security teams share information about the threat or issue with relevant decision-makers and experts to get everyone informed and aligned. To expedite the following phase, response, the right people need to be informed of the issue in an efficient and timely manner.
- Response: Teams begin taking appropriate steps to mitigate the security incident or ideally, remove the threat entirely. They need to identify the “what” and “why“ behind the threat and begin to eradicate it.
- Recovery: At this point teams begin working to resume standard business operations. Employees need to be assured the threat has been contained and regular working conditions are restored.
The weaknesses of traditional incident management solution, all of which are manually based, center around lack of speed and sub-par cohesive information. Without the aid of technology, teams are forced to manually weed through information. This takes an exorbitant amount of time and will almost always slow the above five of the steps down significantly. No organization fares well from a slow incident management process, nor do they recover from a crisis efficiently when battling fragmented communication or siloed data. Simply put, manual strategies take too much time to process and synthesize information – leaving people, assets, information, and reputations at risk.
Enter automation. Bolstered by technologies that can work faster than any team of experts, automated incident management will streamline critical steps and enable faster, more consistent workflows. A manual system has the potential to identify and address a cyber intrusion within hours, while an automated process has the capabilities of doing this in minutes. Automation changes everything.
Why the Right Incident Management Tool Matters
A powerful incident management platform, one that integrates with data sources, offers real-time monitoring tools, delivers AI-driven alerts, and provides collaborative dashboards, has invaluable benefits to a security operations. Removing the need to manually sort through sites and or vet sources one by one to identify plausible solutions, an automated tool serves up the issue along with a series of potential tactics. As a result, security teams receive the information they need in mere minutes, elevating decision-making to heights previously believed impossible.
Legacy tools simply cannot compete with modern automated platforms. Seerist is an example of a solution that is helping organizations reimagine their incident management process. Not only does Seerist leverage the best functionalities of innovations including AI and ML, but this service also delivers expert analysis from on-the-ground expert analysts.
By combining real-world insight with powerful technology, Seerist makes it possible for security teams to do their jobs better. And when security teams are more successful, decision-makers can act faster and with more confidence.
Benefits of Automated Incident Management
The benefits of automated incident management are irrefutable. Automated incident management is not only life-saving but can help organizations resume standard operations at speeds much faster than traditional, manual tactics. The advent of AI and similar innovations have changed the industry completely. A summary of the benefits of automated incident management include:
- Faster detection and response to emerging threats.
- Reduced downtime and minimized disruption to operations.
- Improved accuracy of alerts, reducing false positives and “alert fatigue.”
- Enhanced ability to make rapid, strategic, and reliable decisions during volatile events.
Seerist, which is the first augmented analytics solution for risk and threat analysis, delivers on these four benefits, but goes even further. By integrating AI-driven automation with human expertise to deliver faster, more relevant insights, Seerist offers customers the ultimate fusion of machines and expert analysis. This is an incredible benefit.
While machines can monitor and process information at speeds no human, or team of humans, can achieve. But analysts offer something machines can’t ever replicate – contextual analysis, real-world knowledge, and insider insight. Seerist combines the two, leading to improved response times and synthesized threat intelligence. This powerful fusion helps organizations as they battle a range of operational, geopolitical, and security threats.
Automated Incident Response Systems Are Critical
Automated incident management is an important strategy for organizations to employ to achieve maximum resilience in the face of threats. Automation is faster, eliminates human error, and empowers teams to manage threats effectively. The right incident management tool will not only reduce delays in threat identification, but it can pinpoint critical and essential data than any team can do alone. With key intelligence on hand, decision-makers are now able to streamline the entire incident management process. This is when organizations can realize reduced delays, minimized disruption, and improved resilience.
Automation helps leaders in their battle to maintain operational stability in an unpredictable world. To find out if Seerist is the right incident response software to help your organization gain a decisive advantage in today’s volatile business world, schedule a demo and overview today.
