What is security automation?

Security automation uses software to automate the detection, prevention, investigation, and remediation of cyberattacks or similar threats to IT infrastructure. Security automation can reduce the number and severity of IT security incidents while reducing the need for human intervention. Security automation comprises 2 main functions:

By replacing manual provisioning and scripting, security automation empowers your teams to pivot from repetitive maintenance to complex, high-priority projects. 

Automate security across environments

Computing environments have sprawled in size and complexity due to shifts like the rise of cloud-native development and distributed workforces. You need to provide security for your infrastructure and networks—a job that keeps getting more difficult.

In such complex environments, manual operations can slow detection and remediation, cause resource configuration errors, and create inconsistent policies. These failures can leave your systems vulnerable to attack and trigger expensive, unplanned downtime.

Automation can help simplify daily operations and integrate security into IT infrastructure, processes, hybrid cloud structures, and applications from the start. Deploying comprehensive security automation can drastically reduce breach-related expenses.

See how 5 businesses benefit from security automation

Patch management

Patches are code updates that reduce security vulnerabilities. While managing patches across infrastructures is a complex task, keeping systems up-to-date is a primary defense against cyberattacks. Manually identifying vulnerabilities and deploying updates across multiple endpoints can exhaust production time and create unmanageable workloads for IT teams. Patch management tools automatically deploy and apply updates across systems while generating reports on system status and compliance.

Threat hunting

Fast threat detection reduces the likelihood of a security breach and associated costs if a breach does occur. Manual processes can delay threat identification in complex IT environments, leaving your business vulnerable to attacks. Applying automation to your security processes can help identify, validate, and prioritize threats faster—without manual intervention.

Security incident response 

Quickly identifying and containing security breaches can significantly reduce the average cost of a breach. But when you’re managing an entire ecosystem of platforms and applications, remediating manually can be time-consuming and error-prone. 

Automation empowers security teams to deploy tools that work concurrently, fix affected systems faster, and speed up incident response across the environment. It also simplifies operating and maintaining threat detection solutions like security information and event management (SIEM) software and intrusion detection and prevention systems (IDPS).

Endpoint protection

Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPP) detect, investigate, and remediate malicious activities on endpoint devices, which represent the largest and most targeted attack surface in an IT infrastructure. 

Unified automation solutions—like Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform—help integrate EPP tools into larger security processes that provide event-driven detection, quarantining, and remediation.

See how event-driven automation speeds up security responses

Red Hat provides the tools and expertise for a proactive automation strategy. As a comprehensive subscription product, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can help eliminate manual intervention and ensure security guardrails remain consistent across everything from a single server to complex, multitier environments. By providing hundreds of human-readable playbooks paired with Ansible Content Collections, you can connect disparate security solutions and respond to threats rather than running 1 security task at a time.

Red Hat Ansible Lightspeed uses predictive analytics to identify missing patches before a vulnerability can be exploited. Combined with lifecycle technical support and certified content from our partner ecosystem, Red Hat can help you gain the expertise to scale automation and protect complex security perimeters with confidence. 

Red Hat OpenShift® is a hybrid cloud platform that uses Kubernetes components and built-in security features to manage user access to pods, nodes, and clusters—helping you stay compliant and efficient.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes automates DevSecOps best practices across the build, deploy, and runtime workflows of the application development lifecycle. The platform works with any Kubernetes environment and integrates with DevOps and security tools. It provides developers with security guardrails and automated checks to help them address security concerns earlier in the development cycle.

Red Hat’s approach to security and compliance

Red Hat’s approach to security and compliance: The job is never done (2:21)