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Benefits of Data Security Automation

Data security automation brings many benefits, but three stand out above the rest:

• Greater efficiency: AI-driven automation speeds up otherwise tick-box and time-consuming tasks, accomplishing a larger volume of work while freeing up employees to concentrate on high-priority tasks. This ability to focus on the important things cuts costs and should improve morale at the same time.
• Reduction of human error: While AI allows automation solutions to reduce false positives, automation itself helps to prevent the mistakes that inevitably occur when the work is performed primarily by humans.
• Faster risk identification and mitigation: Automated data security systems can perform 24/7 monitoring and are able to spot and respond to threats more quickly than human actors, enabling rapid mitigation efforts in times when seconds count.

Examples of Data Security Automation Tools

Security solutions offering automation fall into a number of categories. A few examples that you may encounter are:

• Data Security Posture Management (DSPM): These proactive solutions can provide data discovery, classification, remediation and orchestration. AI provides continuously improving accuracy, giving organizations far greater efficiency in their automated classification.
• Data Loss Prevention (DLP): These can automatically apply security policies across different channels to block the theft of data and prevent costly breaches. When paired with AI-powered DSPM, companies ensure that the right information is protected at all times.
• Risk-Adaptive Protection (RAP): This type of solution analyzes users to identify risky behavior that can indicate a compromised user or insider threat, and automatically adjusts policies to mitigate that risk in real time.

Data Security Automation Best Practices

Following these five best practices can help you to get the most out of automation and strengthen your security posture while freeing up valuable time.

1. Prioritize automation based on impact: Review pain points in your data security activities and use these to assess the impact of different automation use cases. You likely will want to automate processes one at a time, so concentrate on where you can inject the most speed or eliminate the most administrative work.
2. Future proof your automation: Look for a security solution that will not only help you address your highest-priority use cases but will also utilize AI in a way that can evolve over time. Balance your short-term needs with longer-term vision.
3. Prepare with playbooks: Start with manual playbooks that document the exact steps to be taken in the case of a security incident so that your team can act quickly and consistently. Then build on these to create automated playbooks for different scenarios, determining in each case when an incident should be flagged or “handed off” to a human.
4. Maximize with employee training: Make sure that your security staff knows how to use a solution to automate processes, but also train them to understand how the system works and what kinds of information it will provide them when they need to get involved. Educating your workers will help you to avoid mistakes and delays and deliver quicker time to value.
5. Refine and expand existing processes: Use the lessons from each automation use case to adjust and refine how you approach automating additional procedures. Ideally you should be able to rely on AI to improve the accuracy of your automated processes over time.

Forcepoint and AI-powered Data Security Automation

Building on industry-leading cloud-based and on-prem data security solutions with a library of over 1,700 pre-defined policies and classifiers, two Forcepoint products make it easy to get the most out of AI-powered automation.

First, Forcepoint Data Security Posture Management (DSPM), powered by Getvisibility, performs continuous discovery and classification of data to provide comprehensive visibility and control. Forcepoint DSPM leverages AI to refine its context-based capabilities to identify data categories while it works, improving accuracy and reducing the need for human intervention. It can also automate reporting to ease regulatory compliance and speed audits.

Forcepoint Risk-Adaptive Protection monitors user behavior and adjusts policies automatically, giving you the flexibility to adapt to real-world situations and the power to detect and block insider threats before they have a chance to strike. The speed and scale of these operations demonstrates the immense potential to make automation not just do the heavy lifting but also make your security operations more effective and intelligent.

Want to learn more about leveraging AI and automation to take your data security to the next level? Read about the solutions that help you achieve Data Security Everywhere, and talk to an expert to set up your customized demo.

Tim Herr