Automate security to align enterprise IT
Introduction: IT cybersecurity and compliance is a top concern
Security is an ongoing focus for most organizations, and many executives share a growing concern about cyberthreats. At the same time, compliance mandates continue to evolve and grow.
When a threat such as a breach or missing compliance mandate happens, the effects can be detrimental to revenue, business valuations, and stakeholder trust. As a result, organizations are reframing their view of cybersecurity as a business driver.
Safeguarding against threats
Protecting your organization is a critical, but often daunting task. Security teams must assemble, maintain, and adapt toolsets to monitor complex environments so they can meet the latest internal and external security policies.
Technical sprawl means that there are additional areas to protect while attacks continue to grow in volume, sophistication and type.
For SecOps teams, it’s imperative to proactively protect this evolving enterprise operation. Yet, there is often a missing link between what security experts observe and the ability to implement the needed changes across the IT operation.
ITOps and DevOps teams are also pressured to stay resilient, yet innovate quickly.
The primary challenges with safeguarding against threats include:
Cybersecurity is critical for business growth
According to Gartner®, cybersecurity is no longer just about protection; it’s a critical driver for business growth. With 85% of CEOs recognizing its importance, security leaders have a unique opportunity to demonstrate the value of cybersecurity investments not only in safeguarding assets but also in enabling strategic business objectives.”1
This perspective signals that security has become a strategic imperative because it helps protect revenue, safeguard trust, and accelerate innovation without disruption.
To keep pace with rising risk and complexity, businesses must evolve through automation to help:
This e-book explores how security automation can be infused across the entire operation, how businesses can accelerate threat response, and how best practices can be implemented for compliance, reporting, and governance.
Chapter 1: Security automation is foundational for cybersecurity and compliance
Once seen as an efficiency gain, automation is quickly becoming a foundational approach to modern cybersecurity.
This shift is redefining how teams safeguard systems, respond to incidents, and build resilience at scale.
What is security automation?
Security automation helps organizations scale their ability to enforce security policies, maintain compliance, reduce operational risk, and efficiently respond to security challenges across hybrid IT environments.
This involves automating the manual tasks associated with managing the security posture of your business. It consists of multiple practices, which can be divided into 5 general categories:
1. Automate security into operational workflows
Automating security into operational workflows makes sure every system, service, and environment is built with protection in place from the start.
Instead of relying on teams to manually apply checks, enroll tools, or validate baselines, automation embeds these steps directly into the workflows that power day-to-day operations.
It begins with defining an automated workflow that consistently performs essential security actions. These may include:
Security automation also supports teams by making sure that security baselines are enforced continuously and uniformly. Whether validating system hardening requirements or making sure that required controls are in place, automation makes these checks consistent and repeatable.
When security automation is considered from the start, compliance requirements can also be integrated into the workflow. Through automation that embodies the relevant internal and external security and compliance policies, you can help make sure that systems operate within defined frameworks, such as Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and other compliance standards, without the additional burden of manual verification.
2. Address vulnerabilities at scale
Every unpatched system is a potential vulnerability. In modern hybrid environments, even a single missed vulnerability can expose an organization to unnecessary risk.
Security automation helps eliminate that risk by integrating with vulnerability scanners or management systems such as Red Hat® Lightspeed, formerly Red Hat Insights. Dynamic inventories automatically generate and filter host lists, drawn from across your operation, to create a granular and current set of targets for automated action. This allows the organization to synchronize across changing infrastructure so that you can deploy patching and configuration management no matter where target resources such as applications, servers, networks, virtual machines (VMs), or cloud instances are located.
Instead of manually gathering lists or relying on out-of-date configuration management database (CMDB) entries, automation continuously identifies assets and keeps inventories current. This means teams can act with confidence, knowing they’re comprehensively addressing affected systems, not just the ones that surfaced through manual checks. The result is more accurate updating with fewer gaps that can potentially create risks.
Automation enhances the full patching lifecycle
By combining dynamic inventory with automation designed around sources of truth that embody your security and compliance policies and baselines, organizations can patch consistently, validate compliance quickly, and remediate vulnerabilities at scale. This reduces exposure, speeds up response, and frees teams to focus on higher-value initiatives—from new innovations to more advanced security capabilities to better resilience.
Automation workflows are flexible and you can design the end-to-end automated process that meets your needs.
Here is an example of how you can structure an automated workflow to apply a patch at scale:
3. Automate security into application development
To safeguard modern applications, security must be built into the application development process before it reaches production. Security automation streamlines the process by embedding protection into every stage of the development lifecycle—from creating code to testing to deploying it at scale, as demonstrated in figure 2.
How a stock exchange reduced trading time to seconds
BYMA, an Argentine Stock Exchange, offers security-focused and transparent access to various investments for institutions, companies, and the general public. To safeguard against emerging threats and vulnerabilities, BYMA set out to reduce operating system (OS) configuration time, improve user access and administration, and automate vulnerability remediation.
Using Ansible Automation Platform, BYMA reduced key administration tasks from minutes to seconds and improved both Log4j vulnerability remediation and its overall security posture.
4. Provide benefits for already busy IT teams
By embedding security tasks directly into operational workflows, protection becomes standardized and consistent.
For security teams, this instills greater confidence in the organization’s overall security posture.
For IT teams, automation simplifies the process to implement security requirements without slowing down delivery or adding procedural overhead.
Event-driven automation takes this a step further. When drift occurs, automated workflows can trigger immediate action or create notifications, reapply source-of-truth configurations, and/or update a CMDB. You define which events matter and how the system should respond.
The result is a consistent, resilient, and efficient security posture delivered without adding more work to already over extended teams.
5. Start small, think big
Security automation doesn’t require a massive overhaul on Day 1. The most successful teams begin with a single playbook—automating 1 repeatable task, 1 security check, or 1 compliance step. Over time, these individual playbooks can be stitched together into larger, end-to-end workflows that automate entire security processes.
This incremental approach helps teams scale automation at the pace that fits their needs and maturity, while still advancing toward their long-term vision.
Adopt a zero -trust approach
Zero trust is an approach to designing security architectures based on the premise that every interaction begins in an untrusted state. Instead of security focusing on fortifying the perimeter, a zero -trust approach incorporates security measures at all levels across the organizations while adhering to a never trust, always verify approach.
Automation helps when you are adopting zero trust by applying security controls to any part of your operation. You can apply policies, open and close access points, enroll required monitoring tooling for key resources and create audit trails and reports.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform modes of operation
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform offers multiple ways to run automation, giving teams the flexibility to address both predictable operational needs and fast-moving, real-time events as they occur. Whether you're executing planned changes at scale or responding instantly to shifts in your environment, Ansible Automation Platform provides a consistent, reliable foundation for response.
Ansible Automation Platform helps teams coordinate tasks across teams and solutions to build a more efficient approach to security operations.
Chapter 2: Accelerate threat response
Modern teams need to outpace threats and must neutralize or remediate these threats as quickly as possible. What if you could respond to alerts automatically?
Ansible Automation Platform helps make this possible through its included Event-Driven Ansible capability, combined with the full breadth of automation features of the platform. It gives teams the power to apply patches, enforce baselines, and update controls consistently across thousands of systems. By working with event-driven automation, Ansible Automation Platform helps IT and security teams respond in real time by accelerating fact gathering without manual steps, and allowing for consistent, automated actions across known and unknown threat scenarios.
Threat response for IT teams
For IT teams, delays often come from gathering facts and routing alerts. You can use Event-Driven Ansible to remove this challenge by automatically collecting system data the moment an alert appears–without delay—then include the facts in a service ticket for accelerated resolution.
For known threats, site-reliability engineers (SREs) can design rulebooks that act in the desired way, whether it’s renewing certificates, disabling suspicious activity, or enhancing tickets by gathering facts automatically to accelerate resolution.
For unknown threats, IT teams can proactively scan for risks such as untagged cloud resources or excessive privileges. You can design automation to handle the discovery, ticket creation, and corrective steps, making resolution scalable yet less complex.
Organizations that pair SRE and security team collaboration with automated response show 54% faster MTTR and more consistent remediation outcomes.2
Threat response for security teams
When it comes to risks, security teams depend on fast visibility and coordinated response. Event-Driven Ansible can be integrated with existing security and observability tools to initiate automated forensics, validate root causes, and, when necessary, quarantine processes or traffic in real time in any domain or across domains.
For known threats, speed is essential. With Event-Driven Ansible, alerts immediately trigger fact gathering and predefined responses, reducing mean time to resolution (MTTR). Teams can also use AIOps capabilities to assist in resolving the issue—further accelerating response while reducing manual lift.
For unknown threats, proactive action is a prudent step. Using automation, teams can continuously scan for exposures such as misconfigurations, privilege escalations, or unsecured cloud resources. Event-Driven Ansible triggers investigations based on events, while Ansible Automation Platform performs targeted scans and applies remediations across large, dynamic inventories.
For example, security teams may receive an alert of escalated privileges and automate an event-driven response to both gather facts, redirect system logging to a SIEM for investigation and disable the service or user. Should the root cause be a configuration error, Ansible can apply the Source of Truth configuration at scale to resolve all affected hosts.
By automating everything from detection to corrective action, organizations can close vulnerabilities early, before they escalate into incidents or disruptions that affect business.
Chapter 3: Implement and maintain compliance
As compliance requirements expand rapidly, keeping up with them across hybrid, multicloud, and distributed environments can be overwhelming for any team.
Security automation helps organizations consistently meet these obligations by enforcing baselines, detecting technology drift, and remediating issues before they become audit concerns.
Hardening
A key component of compliance is hardening, which refers to configuring systems, VMs, applications, cloud services, and networks and edge devices to reduce the attack surface.
Automation streamlines these tasks by validating patches, detecting unauthorized APIs, checking access controls, encrypting sensitive data, and orchestrating secrets or applying identity-management requirements.
For example, an out of compliance network configuration that could potentially create an opening for a threat to occur. This can be managed with a fully-automated response that reapplies the source of truth configuration.
Compliance reporting
Audit and compliance reporting is another area where automation delivers value. Ansible Automation Platform generates both full audit trails of automated actions taken and provides accelerated, flexible reporting across systems and domains.
Using playbooks, teams can create the reports they need, from configuration drift reports to patch status reports to OpenSCAP compliance scans to change histories or targeted gap assessments, without disrupting operations or manually gathering data.
Laying the groundwork for the future
Security automation lays the groundwork for AIOps and automated management of AI infrastructure. Without consistent governance, orchestrated workflows, and reliable data, AI has the potential to amplify a threat and automation keeps it aligned.
IT automation is therefore critical, not just for today’s compliance and risk management needs, but for preparing organizations to adopt AI effectively in the next wave of transformation.
Security automation in national defense
The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) has transformed DODNet operations by introducing enhanced network management and increased automation. Using Ansible Automation Platform for intelligent automation playbooks, DISA has streamlined provisioning, configuration management, and patching to support mission‑critical communications and stringent defense compliance requirements.3
Chapter 4: Security and compliance across the organization
Implementing automation in any area of your organization does not happen instantly, and it’s not an all-or-nothing proposition.
Security automation is a journey. Each organization will start and stop at different points according to their needs. Those needs will also dictate the path that each organization takes. No matter where you are in your journey, even small security automation efforts can deliver benefits.
How Red Hat can help advance your journey
Ansible Automation Platform can serve as an integration layer between your security and IT teams, tools, and processes to extend your security automation capabilities.
A flexible, interoperable platform helps organizations:
Advanced communications and collaboration
Using a consistent automation platform and common language across the organization can also improve communication and collaboration. When using a single language and automation tool, teams can better collaborate to perform required security and compliance actions in a fraction of the time, while making sure there is consistency and accuracy so you can enhance your overall security posture.
An automation platform for the whole organization
There are many automation solutions available, but not all include the capabilities needed for effective security automation. Look for automation platforms that offer:
A universal, accessible automation language
A language that is more straightforward to understand and write allows you to document and share information between security team members with different domain expertise.
A modular and extensible design
A modular platform allows organizations to deploy automation in steps. Extensibility helps to accommodate additional and future security tools as needed.
Move your security organization forward with Ansible Automation Platform
A foundation for building and operating automation services at scale, Ansible Automation Platform delivers all the tools and features you need to implement security automation. It combines a straightforward, readable automation language with a trusted, composable execution environment and security-focused sharing and collaboration capabilities.
Its open foundation allows organizations to connect and automate almost anything you need across your IT infrastructure and security operation, creating a common platform for participation and sharing across the entire organization.
Equipped with a set of security-focused Ansible automation content to coordinate the activity of multiple types of security solutions for a more unified response to cyberthreats and security operations.
Ansible Automation Platform also includes tools and capabilities to help organizations optimize automation. This includes both the automation dashboard and automation analytics, which together provide insight into how automation is used across an organization as well as return of investment (ROI) and benefits from automation.
Ansible Automation Platform delivers business value
A more efficient, streamlined way to automate your security operations helps organizations uncover business value. See figure 4.
Ansible automation hub lets team members access certified automation content through a centralized repository. A rich set of content collections are available to help customers jumpstart automation projects for the multivendor technologies in their environment. Customers can also create custom content that supports digital signing to establish chain of custody and confirm no unauthorized changes have occurred. Policy enforcement further allows control over what automation can do, for example who can run automation on which inventory. Together, all of this means you can operate automation with more confidence.
And the included Ansible Content Collections streamline the management, distribution, and consumption of automation assets. These are Red Hat certified or validated, signed and delivered in a convenient format. To streamline content creation and extend capabilities further, Ansible Automation Platform now includes AI-assisted support through Ansible Lightspeed. This AI service helps users create high-quality automation efficiently by offering intelligent code recommendations based on natural language prompts and can also provide knowledge to support ongoing IT operations.
Reports provide essential information. Automation reduces the time and effort required to create and distribute key data and insights. Together, security teams can operate with the information they need rather than the information they can get—drastically improving security posture.
An automation platform can support an organization’s core business priorities, including:
We chose Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform because we can achieve efficiency and productivity through better controls, fewer mistakes, and the scaling and automation.4
Learn more: Get started with security and compliance for ITOps
Security automation can help identify and respond to growing security threats more quickly and at scale. Red Hat helps safeguard the organization by connecting security teams,
tools, and processes with a consistent, collaborative automation platform.
- Discover how Ansible Automation Platform connects the entire organization in The automated enterprise e-book.
- Learn how to automate security with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
- Explore security for your hybrid cloud. Read the Boost hybrid cloud security e-book.
- Read the use case: Security automation with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Speak with a Red Hatter about taking the next step in your security automation journey.
Gartner Press Release. “Gartner Survey Finds 85% of CEOs Say Cybersecurity is Critical for Business Growth.” April 22, 2025. GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.
Splunk research. “State of Observability 2025.” 2025.
Ferris, Michelle. “DISA transforms DODNet operations to drive efficiency.” United States Government News, 11 Jun. 2025.
IDC White Paper, sponsored by Red Hat. “The business value of Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.” Document #US51839824, Mar. 2024.
