Cybersecurity professionals face more challenges every day. The shift to remote and hybrid work, the rise of microservices, and the ongoing acceleration of technological innovation have created a perfect storm for cybersecurity – both protecting an ever more complex environment and staying ahead of innovation and attackers alike.
Keeping up with this mandate simply isn’t possible with today’s approach to security operations. Worldwide, security teams are struggling to resource both the people and the skills necessary to keep their organizations safe. This year’s SANS Institute survey of security operations leaders found that the two biggest challenges they faced were finding enough staff and having staff that lacked the necessary skills to perform their day-to-day work.
This shouldn’t be surprising. Today’s software engineering teams deploy near-constantly, relying on continuous integration and delivery tools to automate shipping new code to production. Personal devices on corporate networks are now the norm, not the exception. Marketing teams mine personal data and use machine learning to do real-time personalization on company websites. All of these require cybersecurity oversight to protect applications, employees, and sensitive data. But cybersecurity teams haven’t been able to capitalize on the same technological advancements that unlock this type of speed for other teams.
Last year, Perimeter 81 surveyed cybersecurity teams worldwide and found that over half of them use more than 20 different tools every single day to keep their organizations safe. With that many different systems in play, it’s no wonder cybersecurity feels undersupported and underskilled. Alerts from one system have to be prioritized based on enrichment from another, and acted on using the blocking and quarantine capabilities of a third.
To get all these tools working together and to operate seamlessly across the security stack, companies invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in professional services or ask their security analysts to moonlight as software engineers, building integrations between systems and tools to transform and manipulate data.
At the end of the day, the job of cybersecurity is to protect employees, customers, systems, and data. Investing precious time in building integrations, supervising vendors, or writing code – every minute spent here is a minute not spent analyzing and responding to risks. And it’s here that no-code comes into play.
No-code platforms turn technical operations – integrating systems, transforming data, triggering action via API – into activities anyone can perform – regardless of their technical know-how. Security teams that adopt no-code tools to integrate their disparate systems and ensure data flows seamlessly between them can then stop focusing on building the mechanics – and dedicate their time to identifying, prioritizing, and responding to threats – ultimately delivering better protection.
As an example, let’s take last year’s log4shell crisis. Many organizations were brought to a halt as a result of this vulnerability. Not because the mitigation actions were unknown – but because properly understanding the impact and prioritizing what to fix first represented such a significant commitment. This involves scanning dozens of environments across formats ranging from bare metal to public cloud. Then next, identifying impacted assets and collecting the necessary data to understand the importance of the asset, the risk a compromise it poses to the business, and the owner who would be responsible for a fix. Only once all that information is collected and centralized can decisions around prioritization and mitigation actions be made. And even then – it’s a matter of manually creating tickets, following up with asset owners via Slack, and then following up until fixes are complete.
So we’re talking about multiple environments, a handful of different security tools – from Application Security platforms scanning releases to CSPM tools providing visibility into cloud posture. Infrastructure tagging to pull owner and role data, ticketing systems to track mitigation activities through.
This can all be done manually, this can all be done with a lot of engineering effort – or this can be done by any security professional with access to no-code tools that connect these systems, and pass data between them – rapidly accelerating the discovery and prioritization phases of threat response – and helping security teams move at the speed of business.
