Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

Seven Security Automation Trends to Watch in 2023

By Leonid Belkind, CTO and Co-Founder, Torq

In 2022, the value of security automation became crystal clear to security professionals at all levels. Enterprises and SMB organizations alike experienced the benefits of accelerated response times to cyberthreats, the ability to eliminate manual work, and how it contributes to optimizing cybersecurity postures.

But we're only at the beginning of the security automation revolution. In 2023, cyberthreats will continue their relentless, undesired evolution with significantly-increasing disruptive impact. To make matters more complex, this will take place within a challenging macroeconomic environment in which SecOps will be asked to make the most of their existing people and security stack investments. This will create both opportunities and challenges for security professionals across the year, which we believe will manifest themselves in the following ways:

1.   The Necessity for Maximizing Value of Current Security Investments

Most economists agree we are facing a downturn, and possibly a global recession in 2023. That possibility means all organizations will have to become more efficient in their spending. IT and Security professionals will look for ways to drive more value from their existing tech stack, rather than adding more point solutions to it.

Security automation unifies existing security investments and harnesses their potential, enabling organizations to get more bang for the buck. Further, with no-code security automation, a broader range of staff members can play a key role in achieving an optimal cybersecurity posture.

2.   Security Automation Shifts to a Proactive Core Focus

Instead of focusing on building workflows and processes based on prior cyberthreats, security automation deployments will shift to a proactive focus to help prevent attacks before they impact the business. Part of this involves security teams harnessing early threat intelligence signals and building defenses against them into their workflows and processes. The result will be a beneficial new proactive framework that integrates the entirety of the security stack into the most powerful protection approach possible.

3.   Evolving Attacks Relentlessly Continue

Even with all the security training in the world, threat actors continue becoming more cunning, with novel new approaches for deploying threats, and manipulating users. Therefore, the cybersecurity attack surface is certain to expand, not contract.

The fact is there can be no standing on one's laurels any longer and no organization will ever be 100% safe from human error. Security automation and zero-trust are proactive approaches that mitigate these issues, because they acknowledge that it's not a question of if an attack will occur, but when.

4.   Increasing Democratization of Security Responsibility Across Organizations

Security processes will focus on shared responsibilities, in which employees, R&D, DevOps, and IT are true partners and collaborators in protecting their organizations. In 2023, security automation is likely to expand to validate end users' identities, and enable them to have temporary security clearances to engage in system updates, credential retrieval, and remote access with dramatically minimized risk. This is enabled through integration across communications and project management tools, anchored by workflows that ensure accurate verification and access controls.

5.   The End of Dark Corners

The security automation ecosystem will become even more interconnected, so previously disparate security systems can talk to each other. Systems, applications, and tools must become interoperable and interconnected. Security automation enables the seamless bridging of these systems, bringing them together under one roof, for comprehensive management, monitoring, and measurement.

6.   Security Automation Eliminates Technical Barriers to Success

No-code security automation, with its prebuilt workflows and templates, will democratize cybersecurity as a profession, meaning it will eliminate technical barriers, and coding/development knowledge requirements, while enabling staff to deliver the most precise, reliable, and resilient cybersecurity posture possible.

7.   Collaborative and Social Capabilities Become Prevalent

Social capabilities have become critical across many enterprise applications. In 2023, it'll be security automation's turn. After all, once an optimized security workflow has been created, why silo it into one use case? Why not make it available for others to deploy?

This is analogous to the "open sourcing of security," meaning workflows aren't just one-offs. Instead, many can be reused and tweaked for different use cases, further saving time and increasing productivity. Security automation vendors will "bake in" collaboration and social sharing into their platforms, as well as provide a way to export data so it can be used across myriad analytics and BI tools. Security vendors will also pursue creating comprehensive workflow libraries, in addition to template libraries, and make them easily available for instant deployment to their customers.

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Leonid Belkind is a co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Torq, a no-code security automation platform. Prior to Torq, Leonid co-founded, and was CTO of Luminate Security, a pioneer in Zero Trust Network Access and Secure Access Services Edge, where he guided this enterprise-grade service from inception, to Fortune 500 adoption, to acquisition by Symantec. Before Luminate, Leonid managed engineering organizations at Check Point Software Technologies that delivered network, endpoint and data security products to the world's largest organizations.