The modern business environment is one that relies heavily on the internet or more specifically speaking, internet-related services like IaaS, SaaS and PaaS, for everything that happens.
All these technologies have helped modern businesses create some genuinely impressive products.
Regardless of whether it is a B2B or a D2C product, however, the internet has had and will have a major bearing on its operation and maintenance. Naturally, there are bound to be a few challenges along the way.
The internet is a modern republic, which comprises mega corporations, individuals, groups and regulatory authorities.
As with any other nation, the internet is full of criminals too, who like to target the valuable digital assets held by companies.
Organisations use several technologies and strategies to nullify the efforts of these cybercriminals and safeguard their most valuable resources. As a cybersecurity professional, you might already be deploying some of these strategies in your organisation to ward off cybercriminals.
Red teaming is one such strategy you may be familiar with. It’s something that has helped organisations protect their most valuable assets from cybercriminals over the years.
Unfortunately, even though we swear by the effectiveness of red teaming, as cybersecurity professionals, we know that it does come with certain limitations, which can have an effect on just how effective it is in certain situations.
The good news is that there are workarounds to overcome most of the limitations of traditional red teaming, and that is automating red team operations. It is often touted as the future of security testing.
Here’s what you can expect when you deploy an automated red team in your organisation.
Increased scalability
While red teaming is effective at detecting vulnerabilities across the most critical and valuable digital assets of a company, it lacks the scalability to be applied to your entire cybersecurity infrastructure.
The prime reason for this is that traditional red teaming is mostly dependent on the manual efforts of cybersecurity professionals. As a consequence, to achieve scalability, your organisation might need to hire more cybersecurity professionals to form a larger red team.
That is, unless automation can do something about it.
An automated red team will have the ability to scale its operations seamlessly to cover the entirety of your cybersecurity infrastructure, including hardware, software and your team
A continuous stream of realistic (simulated) attacks
As you may already know, traditional red teaming is generally conducted only a few times a year since the process requires manual orchestration across multiple tools, which is incredibly time-consuming.
Non-continuous attack testing, however, can expose your organisation to cyber attacks when the infrastructure is not being tested actively.
Even organisations that have a robust security ecosystem are vulnerable to cyber attacks without continuous testing to identify vulnerabilities as they develop.
By adopting automated red teaming operations, organisations can ensure the safety of their networks and other assets, year-round.
An automated red team will also identify the dynamic attack surface using continuous reconnaissance like state actors and mount realistic simulated attacks with an outside-in approach, meaning it can operate without hardware or software integration. Traditional breach and attack simulations, on the other hand, require hardware and software integration and can only work from inside an organisation.
For that reason, they can’t operate continuously or stage hyper-realistic attack simulations.
Overcome the limitations of traditional red teams with automated red team assessments
Red teaming is a highly effective security testing strategy that can help you identify vulnerabilities across your most valuable digital assets.
That said, it does have certain limitations including poor scalability and its non-continuous nature.
Overcome these limitations and ensure the safety of your data and teams by automating the activities of your red team today.
