5.7. Automation and Orchestration

💡 First Principle: Manual security operations don't scale. When your SIEM generates 10,000 alerts per day and a human must triage each one, response times degrade and analysts burn out. Automation handles repetitive tasks at machine speed; orchestration connects multiple automated tasks into coordinated workflows. Together they allow security teams to respond to threats in seconds rather than hours.

What happens without automation? Analysts spend 80% of their time on repetitive tasks — running the same queries, checking the same logs, blocking the same IOCs across the same 15 systems. Meanwhile, sophisticated threats requiring human analysis go uninvestigated. Automation handles the 80% so humans can focus on the 20% that requires judgment.

Think of automation like an assembly line: each step is defined, repeatable, and fast. A phishing email is reported → SOAR automatically extracts URLs → checks against threat intelligence → blocks the URL on the proxy → quarantines similar emails → creates a ticket — all in under 60 seconds. Without automation, that workflow takes an analyst 30 minutes.