Leveraging Automation to Achieve Consistent Cybersecurity Compliance

Summary

Threat actors, rising regulation-related costs and prolonged skill scarcity threaten organizations’ cybersecurity compliance. How can automation technology resolve these issues?

Cybersecurity compliance automation is necessary

The cost of consistently maintaining cybersecurity compliance is rising. In fact, experts believe it will reach more than $52 per employee in 2024. The ever-evolving threat landscape is the main contributor to escalating expenses.
 
As the frequency of cyber attacks rises, cybersecurity compliance becomes increasingly critical. Already, an incident occurs every 39 seconds on average. Threat actors’ persistence threatens to force organizations into non-compliance.
 
Industry-wide skill scarcity only worsens compliance consistency. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the global cybersecurity workforce shortage surpassed 3.4 million openings in 2022. All indicators suggest it isn’t going away any time soon.
 
Even when businesses have enough cybersecurity staff, they still risk noncompliance. Human error—an industry pain point—is regrettably common. If workers make even minor mistakes, they risk violating regulations.
 
Human error doesn’t just involve misclicks and misconfigurations — ever-changing regulations play a significant role. Keeping up with the speed of regulatory changes proves challenging. In fact, 36% of cybersecurity compliance officers reported it was their greatest obstacle in 2022.

Automation streamlines cybersecurity compliance

Cybersecurity automation dramatically increases productivity, accuracy and incident response speed, accelerating task completion and decreasing human error. Since teams receive support for monotonous and time-consuming tasks, their workloads lighten. Consequently, they can prioritize high-risk compliance threats without impacting ongoing vulnerability detection, network monitoring or policy violations.
 
Threat actors don’t rest after cybersecurity teams clock out—and neither does automation technology. On top of alleviating professionals’ workloads, it also takes on time-sensitive tasks. It continues operating during off-hours and breaks, streamlining compliance processes.
 
Automation technology decreases operational expenses, making compliance less costly. Additionally, it often prevents firms from incurring non-compliance fines. As a result, cybersecurity teams can redirect excess funds to streamline their workflows even further.

How automation makes compliance consistent

Automation technology enables enterprises to achieve consistent compliance with cybersecurity regulations.

Prevention
Tools like security orchestration, automation and response platforms, artificial intelligence and robot process automation (RPA) help cybersecurity teams proactively assess risk, consistently improving their preventative efforts. Moreover, automation technology is immune to human error.
 
Since 95% of cybersecurity incidents stem from workers’ mistakes, this impact is significant. Its consistently high accuracy lowers the chance of future non-compliance.

Detection
Threat detection is critical for maintaining compliance, but cybersecurity teams often struggle with timeliness. For instance, data breach identification and remediation lasts around 277 days on average. Automation technology can change this trend.
 
Technology like automated role-based access control (RBAC), RPA, AI and security information and event management systems can automatically detect threats posing a non-compliance risk. This way, teams get ample time to address critical issues.

Response
RPA, AI and RBAC tools can automatically trigger corrective action in response to non-compliance. They can send critical alerts, block users’ actions or initiate a specialized incident response to address the issue’s source.

Reporting
Automated tools can take over mandatory reporting so cybersecurity professionals can focus on high-priority tasks instead. Additionally, some can generate and send compliance reports to team leaders, providing crucial insight into areas of improvement regarding non-compliance.

Best practices for utilizing automation for compliance

While leveraging automation for cybersecurity compliance is beneficial, organizations must implement and utilize their technology strategically. They are more likely to succeed consistently if they follow the best practices.
 
One of the best practices for leveraging automation technology for cybersecurity compliance involves incremental deployment. While a complete transformation may sound good in theory, it creates security gaps and an untold number of new vulnerabilities.
 
Cybersecurity professionals should store the information their automated tools collect in a central location. Making storage and access processes uniform instead of creating data silos will streamline compliance efforts.
 
Another best practice for implementation involves training staff on the new tools—widespread labor scarcity in the cybersecurity industry demands it. In 2021, 43% of chief information security officers reported their teams were experiencing a skills shortage. Education prevents human-error-related non-compliance mistakes.

Automation is crucial for compliance consistency

Companies can leverage automation technology to achieve consistent compliance despite accelerating regulatory changes, rising regulation-related costs, industry-wide skill scarcity and an ever-evolving threat landscape. If they follow the best practices for implementation and utilization, they can all but ensure their success.