How Small Businesses can Secure Digital & Information Assets with Automation

With constant news of fresh security breaches on a daily basis, protecting the enterprise's digital and information assets seems like an impossible task. Already this year, we've seen millions of records compromised by malicious attacks; businesses are now on the verge of spending an amount for protection against data breaches and cyberattacks. 

There are essentially too many actors and too many threats for any organization to avoid. Moreover, humans are inherently bad at security because we tend to think short-term. So it's not a matter of if there will be any cyberattack hit, but when-and what you'd do about it.

Though there's nothing such as 100% security or a perfect security solution; businesses can proactively avoid threats using trends that most of the major companies follow such as, Zero Trust Network Access Security solution. 

Zero Trust solution allows businesses to verify each and every access request to their cloud assets and grants permission only after verification, the technology follows the "Never Trust Always Verify" approach to safeguard from any data breach.

Securing assets is all about knowing risk tolerance, restricting exposure and attack vectors by automating as much as possible, and doing all that you can to prevent human errors. For most organizations, this will require a critical change in thinking about infrastructure, applications, the security operations center, and the IT culture itself. 

Understanding the need for security automation:

One of the misconceptions that organizations have is that major threats are external. But most breaches come from simple human error, having said that; it's not that people aren't doing their jobs, just that the jobs are too big. This is because to a great extent the ways in which networks and infrastructure have expanded in size, scope, and complexity for on-premises, in the cloud, and with new models like containers and serverless. 

On the other hand, even today businesses have traditional systems running applications that are critical to specific departments or the entire business. This leads to the complexity of patching the myriad, despair, and often older frameworks that organizations have running today.

To secure cloud applications, IT and security teams are trying to be steady over new as well as old vulnerabilities in an environment where employees need not compromise on productivity and not necessarily push applications, services, products for improvements quite often. 

Due to all this, trying to maintain a secure and consistent environment through manual operations is illogical. With the help of Software Defined Perimeter and Zero Trust, businesses can automate much of their security activities to avoid data breach and maintain their assets without leaking confidentiality.

Areas that are ripe for automation include:

• To manage configuration.


• Manage Workflows - this includes services.


• Package management - this includes patch management, OS hardening, provisioning framework, reconciliation with IT service management tools, and storage provisioning)


• Continuous security and monitoring, including vulnerability in identification and management. Administrating proactively for security, control, and compliance policies.

Begin with small steps:

There's a lot to automate, so it's better to take baby steps. Automation is a huge technical and cultural shift. While the objective is to automate as much as possible, trying to accomplish too much too soon will only lead to confusion and frustration.

• Work iteratively, recognizing, measuring, and celebrating efforts along the way


• Ensure everything is repeatable/reproducible


• Offer the information


• Try not to disregard the social piece


• Observe the benefits of automation snowball

As employees across the organizations get to observe and participate in the benefits of automation, it's obvious to see the increasing demand for further security steps from time to time.

Many companies are implementing cloud vpn alternatives that help them expand automation efforts to improve compliance with security policies, deploy resources consistently at scale, and identify as well as remediate security issues faster. 

Though its quite obvious that security issues will tend to increase, automation can help businesses withstand and avoid them.