Security teams are aware of the variety of adversaries that could target them, including nation-state hackers, ransomware gangs, and overworked phishing operators. But I’d argue they face headwinds from another surprising source: their own workflows. They encounter bottlenecks that impair their defenses because they continue to use primarily manual and human-based procedures for threat identification, investigation, and remediation.

The new standard for threat intelligence maturity should be speed to validate. Additionally, many organizations can strive to add automation over time to improve their maturity and security outcomes, even though they lack the time, resources, expertise, and personnel to swiftly validate and hunt threats. They will receive contextualized intelligence that is pertinent and instantly useful rather than creating and executing manual hunts.

They will have a system that integrates with all pertinent security controls to enable quick hunting at scale, rather than needing to plan and carry out hunting activities across dozens of tools one after the other. They will have AI-powered tools that help prioritize and summarize follow-up tasks for stakeholders, as well as risk insights to share with executives, so they won't have to struggle to understand what comes next. They will close the distance on attackers rather than lagging behind.

In my experience as a security leader, automation and autonomous systems have the potential to drastically alter the capabilities of security teams.