Manual processes and tasks can often be described as tedious and inefficient. Especially in an age where wasting precious time and resources can have a large negative impact, organizations need to incorporate capabilities that help automate their workflows. Research states that automation may reduce work by up to 30% in some functions. We had this statistic in mind when building automation capabilities into the SecurityScorecard platform.
SecurityScorecard enables IT and security teams to automate key workflows so they can save time and focus on the most critical aspects of their job. Users can easily create rules in the Security Ratings platform that automatically take action when a Scorecard rating change takes place. There are many benefits of moving from manual tracking to automation, and here are the 3 most common benefits that we see from customers that use SecurityScorecard’s Rule Builder.
1. Increase productivity
By utilizing automated workflows, companies can reduce the number of manual tasks performed by employees, which not only frees them up to work on more important projects but it reduces human error. Security threats, such as new issues or breaches are more likely to get noticed with automated alerts and actions.
How to use Rule Builder:
- Easily create workflows in Rule Builder which will alert appropriate team members and share reports with executives in the event of a data breach. The time you save can be spent on other critical tasks, improving your overall productivity.
- Create a rule to alert your security team when a new Common Vulnerability & Exposure (CVE) arrives on your Scorecard. This way, your organization will never miss these types of vulnerabilities and can quickly work to remediate them.
2. Enhance continuous monitoring
Organizations are dealing with complicated third-party ecosystems, with numerous vendors, suppliers, and partners, multiple tiers, and different teams within the organization. This makes it hard to continuously monitor every third party that an organization interacts with. With automated triggers such as alerts and sharing reports, third parties won’t slip through the cracks. Users can set multiple rules for different types of vendors and the different types of risks, enhancing third-party risk management. With Rule Builder organizations can demonstrate continuous monitoring compliance of their third-party ecosystem.
How to use Rule Builder:
- If your organization has categorized your third parties into different tiers and portfolios, creating rules for each of these portfolios helps continuously monitor all vendors, even your non-critical suppliers. Depending on the trigger that is the most important to your organization, Rule Builder helps you stay informed of any changes to your portfolio of monitored companies.
- To understand which organizations are introducing threats, create rules to move third parties to a new portfolio for further investigation. This will enable you to understand which issues, CVEs, breaches, etc are tied to which third parties as soon as you log in to the platform.
3. Easier collaboration
Security and third-party risk management are multifaceted, which often leads to multiple coworkers and teams working on different projects within the organization. For example, while security and IT teams are focused on the security risks of their own internal organization, vendor risk managers (VRM) are focused on monitoring the security posture of all their vendors, and the M&A team is focused on the security risk of potential acquisition targets. Since these teams might not talk every day, automating workflows can help alert the appropriate people on what actions to take next.
How to use Rule Builder:
- Create alerts for specific team members around new issues or breaches so that the appropriate team/people can proactively address the issues.
- Create a rule that automatically moves a Scorecard from your M&A portfolio to another portfolio for further investigation if it meets certain criteria (i.e. the score drops below a C rating) and alerts the M&A team.
Teams are able to fully customize Rule Builder (one of the key capabilities in the Spring 2020 Product Release) using a variety of triggers and actions, enabling teams to collaborate more effectively across the organization.
Conclusion
Incorporating automation and creating workflows is becoming increasingly important as organizations start working with more third parties and have to keep up with the fast-paced threat landscape. SecurityScorecard’s Rule Builder increases efficiency while reducing overall risk in their organization.
