Automating security operations, or SecOps, is one of the most powerful strategies organizations can employ to protect themselves and their data. All too often, however, they don’t leverage it as well as they could.

Security automation pulls together data from disparate systems to make information more visible and actionable. For example, a solution may not only alert IT teams to a critical vulnerability on enterprise devices but also initiate remediation. It could spot a vulnerability that can be solved with a specific patch, so staff members can determine the best way to solve the problem.

Here are a few of the ways organizations are putting SecOps to work, delivering greater efficiencies and peace of mind to their IT teams.

Late last year, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a new guidance document for cybersecurity incident response: Technical Approaches to Uncovering and Remediating Malicious Activity. This marked a major moment in cybersecurity guidance because it wasn’t just the work of CISA’s U.S. authors. It was a joint effort that represents the consensus guidance of cybersecurity experts from the governments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States.

As organizations struggle to combat the steadily increasing risk posed by ransomware, business email compromise and other threats, this international consensus provides important guidance on the best ways to prepare for, detect and respond to malicious cyberattacks, and how to avoid common pitfalls. Let’s take a look at five key takeaways from the guidance.

Cybersecurity teams often find themselves faced with the unenviable challenge of trying to anticipate the next attack they’ll face. Rising to this challenge requires deep visibility into the activity of the many users and devices that operate on enterprise networks, which enables security teams to look for signs of unusual activity. Teams that react quicky with automated responses have the greatest chance to nip malicious activity in the bud, protecting their information and systems.

Endpoint protection has evolved in recent years to meet these increased demands. Cybersecurity teams shifted away from traditional anti-malware tools to next-generation endpoint detection and response solutions that provide deep insight into desktops, laptops and mobile devices. While EDR technology marked a significant advance, IT security professionals still have an overarching need: the ability to see the big picture.

Extended detection and response solutions, or XDR, promise to fill this gap, supplementing EDR’s device-centric capabilities with the ability to observe network traffic, peer into cloud services and comb through the activity logs generated by other security solutions. Acting on this knowledge, XDR platforms are able to alert administrators to suspicious activity and trigger situation-specific automated responses.

Cybersecurity philosophies have changed significantly over time to adapt to the changing needs of the organizations they serve. In the early days of cybersecurity, we focused on building boundaries between the “inside” and the “outside.” Users and devices that we trusted were placed inside network perimeters and granted largely unfettered access to systems and data within that environment. Those on the outside were untrusted and blocked from accessing sensitive resources. While that approach served us well for decades, it fails to meet the needs of increasingly mobile and cloud-focused organizations as well as increasingly sophisticated and covert threats and malware. The evolution of the perimeter of the network has made it difficult to draw lines between “inside” and “outside” effectively.

Zero-trust architecture (ZTA) represents a philosophical shift in cybersecurity planning that seeks to address this limitation by making trust decisions based on the identity of a user or device, rather than the location.

COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdowns altered the course of history. Children looked to their parents to provide advice on how to persevere in trying times. I told my children that something good can come from something bad. The same is true when it comes to security. The dramatic shift to a remote workforce was effectively leveraged by many organizations to enhance their security posture.

We recently received a call from the CISO of a large organization, who asked for CDW’s help. He explained that one of his organization’s competitors had experienced a significant security breach that shut down its operations for several days. An employee in an administrative office had clicked a link on a malicious email that opened the door for a devastating ransomware outbreak.

The COVID-19 pandemic suddenly transformed the way that we all work. Businesses around the world found themselves rapidly shifting to a remote work environment that required agile reconfiguration of systems and shifts in security policy. Cybersecurity teams scrambled to protect the confidentiality, integrity and availability of the data entrusted to their care while accommodating unprecedented remote work requirements.

Now that organizations have settled into these new work routines, it’s time to take a look at how these changes will shape future trends in the way that we work and how security teams can build controls that both facilitate remote work and foster a defense-in-depth approach to cybersecurity.

Let’s look at four major cybersecurity trends that will endure beyond the pandemic.