There is increasing awareness that cybersecurity is “everyone’s job,” as NIST, a government agency that helps develop IT security best practices, puts it. In other words, it’s not just technical employees within the IT organization who must help to prevent and detect cybersecurity risks. Everyone in the organization, including employees with no background in technology or cybersecurity, has a role to play in defending against cyberthreats. That, at least, is the theory. In practice, actually getting everyone in a typical organization to adhere to cybersecurity best practices is often easier said than done. If most of your employees know little about IT, it can be quite challenging to make them understand and react to security risks that affect IT resources and services. Fortunately, there’s a secret weapon that IT leaders can leverage to help make security a collective responsibility across the organization: Process automation.

Process automation is one of the most effective strategies businesses can embrace to enforce a security-centric culture for every employee.

Here’s a look at how process automation serves this goal, along with specific examples of how businesses can leverage process automation to strengthen cybersecurity.

What is IT Process Automation?

IT process automation is the use of automated tools and services to manage processes that occur within an organization. Classic examples of IT process automation include auto-configuring access rights for new employees and automatically generating emails to inform users when they’re close to running out of space in their email accounts, to name just a couple of ways in which organizations commonly use process automation.

The main benefits of automating processes like these from a business perspective are straightforward. Process automation saves time and resources for IT teams. It also reduces the amount of time that users have to spend waiting on the IT department to complete processes that they depend on. In both senses, process automation leads to higher productivity at lower costs.

How Process Automation Enhances Security

That said, the value of process automation isn’t limited to saving time and increasing efficiency. Process automation can also go far to enhance security across the organization.

For proof, consider these examples of how process automation lowers the security risks associated with every user in the organization.

Phishing Tests
Process automation can help businesses fight one of the main scourges of modern cybersecurity: Phishing attacks.

One of the best ways to test how resilient your organization is against phishing is to send mock phishing emails to users. The emails contain links designed to emulate those that users might encounter in actual phishing content. By tracking how many users click the links, you can assess how many users are susceptible to phishing. You can also identify specific users who would benefit from more education about why phishing is dangerous.

You could perform phishing tests manually, but doing so at scale is unrealistic. A better approach is to automate the generation of mock phishing emails, and to repeat tests on a regular basis, using process automation tools.

Managing Rogue IT Risks
Organizations often invest a lot of resources in securing the business tools that their employees are supposed to use. They monitor their email systems for phishing emails, for instance, and they ensure that customer data stored in CRM platforms is locked down.

But all of that effort is for naught if your employees use unsanctioned solutions at work – a practice known as rogue IT. For example, an employee might use a third-party email service that your IT department does not support or monitor. Some employees make decisions like this in a deliberate effort to circumvent corporate security controls, but in many cases, the employees simply don’t understand how the use of third-party software can create security risks. They don’t know that they are more vulnerable to phishing attacks on a platform where there are no anti-phishing safeguards in place, for instance.

Process automation can help to mitigate the risks associated with rogue IT by ensuring that officially supported systems are well integrated with business processes. For instance, if the productivity software that employees use on an everyday basis is integrated with your corporate email service such that routine emails are automatically generated on the sanctioned email platform, you reduce the risk that employees will choose to use third-party services.

In other words, process automation helps steer employees by default toward using secure solutions.

Increasing Security Visibility
The typical security team monitors infrastructure and applications to detect threats. But to gain as much visibility as possible into potential risks, organizations should do more than just monitor IT resources. They should also examine the behavior of every user within the business in order to detect potential risks.

Process automation helps here because when you automate processes, you create a trail of digital breadcrumbs that IT teams can monitor to detect unusual behavior by users across the organization.

For example, imagine that you automate the process employees use to request access to a CRM system. That process would systematically generate an array of data about access requests, including how often the requests appear, which user groups and departments they originate from, and even the times of day when employees typically make requests. Based on this data, you could detect anomalous requests, such as those that appear at an unusual time of day or from a user who belongs to a group that does not normally access the CRM system. Those anomalous requests could be a sign of attempts by attackers to misuse the account of an employee that they have compromised or of a malicious insider who is trying to access a system that he or she doesn’t actually need.

Those anomalies would be much harder to detect if you managed CRM system requests manually because you wouldn’t have a collection of data points that establish a baseline of normal request activity.

In this example, process automation doesn’t encourage users to behave more securely, but it does help the IT team to detect security risks associated with non-technical users that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Conclusion: Plug Security Gaps With Process Automation

On its own, process automation will certainly not protect your business from every cybersecurity risk it faces today. However, process automation does much to plug gaps in cybersecurity strategies, especially when it comes to activities undertaken by non-technical users. It helps security teams to monitor and validate actions by other employees who might inadvertently place the organization at risk. It also makes workflows as secure as possible by default, which significantly reduces the chances that well-intentioned employees might accidentally circumvent security rules.