Security teams want more intelligent automation to alleviate the compliance burden

The Bottom Line: Regulation and compliance requirements keep increasing, and the impact of non-compliance has never been this high. The already high volume of compliance activities is suffocating information security functions and disregarding them is certainly not an option. But there should not be a trade-off between meeting compliance requirements and improving security posture (to get ready to face the security challenges of our complex and uncertain future world). It is high time for enterprises to equip information security functions with the necessary intelligent automation solutions to help them alleviate the growing, and in many cases unsustainable, compliance burden.

Nearly three-quarters (74%) of enterprise clients think that their information security functions are spending too much time on compliance activities and not enough on getting ready to tackle modern security threats. Most enterprise clients believe that the adoption of intelligent automation solutions can help them automate a wide range of compliance activities, allowing them to spend more time focusing on security improvements and modernization initiatives.

• Forty-one percent (41%) strongly agree that intelligent virtual assistants can improve the effectiveness of control operation activities by guiding information security professionals through existing standard operating procedures and validating the completeness and accuracy of control execution.
• Forty percent (40%) strongly agree that the use of advanced data ingestion capabilities can enrich existing data sets with a wide range of unstructured data, allowing information security teams to uncover new trends, identify emerging compliance risks, and adopt a more effective risk-based approach to compliance.
• Thirty-nine percent (39%) strongly agree that the use of process mining techniques can help identify non-adherence to standard operating procedures and control deviations, allowing information security teams to reduce the risk exposure by applying corrective actions in a timely manner. It is not a surprise to see that thirty-eight percent (38%) also strongly agree that machine learning techniques can help improve the quality of event logs and uncover root causes behind non-compliance patterns.
• A unanimous hundred percent (100%) of enterprise clients believe that robotic process automation (RPA) can help information security functions automate the execution of routine, rule-based, and high-volume control operation activities performed on a day-to-day basis.