Minimising development downtime and disruption through workflow automation

DevOps teams are under constant pressure to deliver software applications as quickly as possible. At the same time, DevSecOps and security operations centre (SOC) teams face an ongoing challenge in detecting and remediating constantly evolving security threats. These challenges can be exacerbated by the various complex and often error-prone processes involved in responding to disruptions and changes to an organisation’s systems.

A large amount of time can be spent switching between different tools to gather the context required for remediation, and in the manual execution of tasks needed for incident management, significantly prolonging downtime and causing further disruption. It can be hard to prioritise and manually respond to the high volumes of alerts generated by larger and more complex systems, further delaying resolution and increasing the risk of human error.

Fortunately, a range of new workflow automation tools are available to support DevOps, DevSecOps and SOC teams, specifically in the observability and real-time monitoring of servers, databases, SaaS tools and services across their organisations’ cloud and IT infrastructure.

Automate end-to-end processes

Workflow automation helps teams more confidently manage the health of their systems and resolve issues faster, automating and orchestrating complex flows of tasks in response to specific threats, events, and alerts, and allowing teams to incorporate human input into those flows where required.

By allowing them to combine monitoring and remediation into a single, streamlined solution, new workflow automation tools can enable DevOps to automate and orchestrate entire end-to-end processes across their infrastructure and tools, helping them to quickly remediate any issues that might arise.

Consider alerts, for example. Whether monitoring network health, application performance, or infrastructure resources, DevOps teams must set alerts. By letting them know the moment an issue occurs, an alert allows them to respond in an appropriate and timely manner. But responding to alerts manually can be repetitive and time-consuming: an alert might send notifications in the middle of the night, or engineers might have to restart an application to resolve the issue manually. However, creating a workflow which consists of connected remedial actions that automatically execute when a specific alert is triggered can significantly reduce a team’s mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Tackling emerging threats

The technology has considerable benefits for DevSecOps and SOC teams, too, enabling them to orchestrate an automated series of actions in response to an alert, and quickly tackle any emerging threats to their system’s security. By chaining together specific actions in a workflow, or actions from integrations such as AWS, Okta and others, teams can configure workflows to trigger a specific alert and automatically execute an important security process, such as blocking a suspicious IP address, performing tier–one triage—such as reviewing and adding context to threats detected by cloud SIEM—or rolling back a code deployment that introduces a vulnerability.

An organisation might use Okta for identity and access management, for example, and has a rule in place which detects when a user attempts to access an application without authorisation. Configuring and adding a “Suspend Suspicious Okta User” workflow means that if and when that rule is triggered, the suspicious user will be automatically suspended 

Workflow automation can even help create new rules that establish whether an alert has detected a real threat or a false positive. Although security signals provide much information, it’s not always enough to indicate whether an alert requires further investigation. By enriching cases with relevant context from the observability data generated through real-time monitoring, teams can better identify and eliminate false positives and determine whether an incident is a malicious event.

DevSecOps and SOC teams can also combine new cloud SIEM and automated workflows to automate repetitive security tasks like detecting emerging vulnerabilities or triaging security signals. Traditionally separate automation, SIEM, and case management capabilities can be unified in a single pane of glass, allowing teams to create a centralised workspace for investigating their security signals. Not only does this help teams reduce tool sprawl and spending, but the combined use of cloud SIEM and automated workflows also reduces the burden on security engineers, allowing them to focus on more complex tasks.

Streamlining monitoring and troubleshooting

Today’s security teams operate in a constantly evolving, increasingly complex, and challenging environment. The use of disparate point solutions only adds to this complexity and can risk an ineffective security posture. Workflow automation helps mitigate this risk, streamlining monitoring and troubleshooting by automating end-to-end processes and executing actions in response to alerts, security threats, and other insights.

As well as boosting productivity and saving valuable time, implementing automated workflows in response to security threats allows an organisation’s DevOps, DevSecOps, and SOC teams to focus on the most critical security issues and more quickly and easily detect and defend against potential attacks.