Security operations centers (SOCs) tend to chase shiny new tools, hoping for a silver bullet to solve growing alert fatigue and talent shortages. Given the complexities of commercial and enterprise cybersecurity, we must prioritize cyber resilience—the ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyberattacks.
Achieving this resilience doesn't start with the most expensive AI implementation; it starts with a disciplined, pragmatic focus on automation.
Scripted Consistency Trumps Creative AI
First, let’s define automation. As security leaders, we must distinguish between automation that delivers consistent, resilient outcomes and complex AI solutions.
Automation, at its core, is simply the elimination of anything you do manually and repeatedly.
For many core security functions, scripted automation, in the form of playbooks and workflows built on SOAR platforms, remains the best choice for resilience.
- Predictability is Resilience: In sensitive, process-driven environments, you need predictable, auditable outcomes. For tasks like applying firewall rules, you absolutely do not want an AI agent "creatively reinterpreting" your intent. Scripts ensure identical implementation of an authorized protocol every time, which is fundamental to maintaining a known, secure state.
- Define Where AI Fits: AI agents certainly have a role, but it is often as an automation enabler. Use AI to handle the messy, human elements—such as standardizing and validating poor-quality inputs (e.g., normalizing disparate service desk tickets) before passing them off to a reliable, cost-effective script for execution.
- Focus on Cost and Resource Efficiency: Basic automation is cheap, predictable, and light on resources, offering literal cost reduction. Complex AI is expensive and computationally heavy. We recommend adopting a "Basic First" mindset: automate everything you can with predictable scripts and reserve high-cost AI for the truly difficult, high-variability problems.
Neglecting Optimization via Automation Drags Down Resilience
If automation is so effective, why are so many SOCs still bogged down in manual work? The answer lies in the unfortunate reality of how we prioritize security work.
We often relate automation to "cost reduction" rather than "risk reduction." It lacks the glamour of new tool deployment or a high-profile incident response.
- Invisible Effort: We fail to recognize or promote analysts and engineers for optimizing a handful of use cases. The resulting efficiency gain (e.g., 4% greater efficiency) is unnoticeable day-to-day. Therefore, analysts and engineers view this work as “thankless” and boring.
- The Disaster Cycle: This neglect compounds over months until the organization suddenly realizes it needs a massive, costly project just to recoup the wasted analyst time. Like proper documentation or configuration management, optimization is "in the trenches" work that is easy to ignore until a disaster forces the issue.
This lack of continuous improvement directly impacts cyber resilience. Analysts overwhelmed by manual triage and false positives miss critical alerts and suffer decision fatigue, crippling the SOC's ability to respond effectively.
Expedite Solving the Two Biggest Automation Challenges
As a security leader, you’re tasked with aligning security to the business, yet task your team with operational bookkeeping. This is where a focused, boutique Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) can be a true strategic partner, solving the two biggest challenges in automation: prioritization and continuity.
Expert-Driven Prioritization
Boutique MSSPs bring an outside perspective that cuts through internal inertia and politics. They help you focus on impact immediately:
- Top 10 Time-Sinks: They leverage a repeatable methodology to quickly identify your top 10 processes based on the highest time consumption (frequency X time per event). Don't waste budget on item number 27 on your list, for example. A focus on the top 10 ensures every dollar spent on a playbook and script targets the most painful, resource-intensive tasks.
For example, A critical task that takes 30 minutes but occurs only once per month is a low priority. Compare that to a simple enrichment lookup that takes only five minutes but occurs 80 times per week. Which makes more sense to automate?
- Cut Time to Value from Automation: The expert talent at boutique MSSPs are highly trained to spot the low-hanging fruit. This includes tasks like manual external lookups, enrichment, and ad-hoc data gathering that your analysts perform daily. They can then convert them into robust, cost-saving automation scripts.
Institutionalizing the Feedback Loop
The greatest value of a boutique MSSP is their ability to embed automation as an evergreen function, eliminating the neglect problem:
- Process Engineering: MSSPs are adept at designing automated feedback loops into your SOC's workflow. This includes the crucial step of prompting analysts after every event: "Was this a false positive?" and "Did you have many manual steps that could be automated?" This ensures that you continuously surface new automation candidates beyond an annual audit.
- SOAR Mastery and Customization: While modern SOAR platforms are largely codeless, they still require expertise to build complex conditional playbooks necessary for diverse enterprise environments (multi-cloud, mixed OS). A boutique MSSP brings deep, cross-platform expertise, ensuring the correct implementation, maintenance, and updating of custom playbooks based on your risk profile.
The Prerequisite for Successful Automation
Finally, never forget the foundational truth of security process improvement:
Automation cannot fix a broken process.
As a CISO, your partnership with an MSSP should begin with a mandate to fix the broken inputs first. If tickets are a mess or data quality is poor, using an AI agent to clean it up before applying scripted automation ensures that you are implementing quality, predictable resilience, not just faster garbage-in, garbage-out.
By leveraging a boutique MSSP, you gain access to the specialized resources and process discipline needed to focus your internal teams on high-value, strategic work.
The result? You’ll have a more efficient and demonstrably resilient security operation.