International. The rapid success of automation is largely attributed to the ability to perform repetitive tasks accurately and quickly through the user interface, according to UiPath.
Gartner has adopted the term "Hyperautomation" to emphasize the enormous appreciation time advantage that automation brings and recognizes all the benefits of combining robotic process automation (RPA) with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML).
"RPA has provided a faster digital transformation than any other technology and has done so by focusing on business outcomes first. Robots have proven to be vital in almost every business-critical process," said Haig Hanessian, Sales Latin America at Uipath.
Taking the pandemic as an example, automation proved to be one of the only technologies to respond quickly to stresses in the government and hospital systems. Automation has helped nurses spend more time with patients and is helping to accelerate clinical trials in the run-up to a vaccine and life-saving therapy.
The area where speed of response is important is cybersecurity. Your business depends on how quickly you respond and protect against new threats. Let's consider a simplified security workflow for a moment. Let's imagine that there is something "wrong" that poses a threat and we want to protect ourselves from it.
If we know what the threat is, we can keep an eye on it. In practical terms, we'll probably have to keep an eye out for a fairly broad threat surface that includes cloud, network, and endpoint environments. A threat surface is the total number of potential security exposures. Since attackers don't need much time to cause damage or disruption, we'll need to keep an eye on real-time – or as close to real-time as possible.
Real-time data flows reach a central system, such as an external data representation (XDR), can normalize and aggregate the data and look for signs of a threat.
How do I identify a threat? It can mean several things – a specific malware signature, a pattern of behavior, or a series of events that are individually innocuous but combined reveal a sophisticated attack. XDR applies a number of techniques to determine with some degree of confidence whether or not the data captured evidence of an attack.
And how do we know what to look for? Ideally, we have a team of "threat hunters" conducting proactive investigations. But we also want to help them by equipping them with tools that can learn threat patterns and reveal links that can escape human "detection."
OK, following the reasoning: the system detected something suspicious. Do we automatically implement any kind of response? If so, where? And how? Or do we create an analyst for examination? So far, we only consider a single threat among the countless that exist. Now let's expand the example to include all threats, even those we don't know how to recognize. In addition, we will expand the environment to include a number of security products and solutions from various vendors.
Even with this simple example, it's clear that modern cybersecurity is based on complex workflows that involve:
1. Consume and process information
2. Decide when and where to act
3. Implementation of these actions
4. Measuring the response (i.e. did it work?)
"RPA offers an improvement as it makes automation more accessible. But hyperautomation offers a new level of potential to automate, accelerate and improve safety responses," said Haig.
Hyperautomation means:
1. Security teams can track the increasing number of security alerts and potential incidents, as more tasks are automated and analyses are improved leading to fewer false positives and wasteful
2. Responses, whether fully automated or even dependent on human involvement, are implemented more quickly and accurately.
3. Things that could not be automated before (for example, because there is no API) can be incorporated into the automated workflow.
And the simplified example above is still just scratching the surface: the potential is really limitless.
