Leveraging automation should be a priority for security and risk management leaders if they are to create and preserve value within their organisations according to analysts at Gartner. Katell Thielemann, research vice president at Gartner, explained to an audience of more than 3,500 security and risk management professionals at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit, that the shift towards automation emerging in the security and risk landscape is one where new mindsets, practices and technologies are converging to unlock new capabilities. Using automation in areas of identity, data, and new products and services development were identified as three critical areas for the security and risk enterprise.

Thielemann said: “We are no longer asking the singular question of how we’re managing risk and providing security to our organisation. We’re now being asked how we’re helping the enterprise realise more value while assessing and managing risk, security and even safety. The best way to bring value to your organisations today is to leverage automation.”

She points out that automation is already all around us and is starting to impact the security and risk world both as an enabler to the security and risk function itself, and also as new security frontiers that need to be acknowledged and understood.

“Automation follows a continuum of sophistication and complexity, and can use a number of techniques, either stand-alone or in combination,” said David Mahdi, senior research director at Gartner. “For example, robotic process automation currently works best in task-centric environments, but process automation is evolving to increasingly powerful bots, and eventually to autonomous process orchestration.”

By 2021, 17% of the average organisation’s revenue will be devoted to digital business initiatives, and by 2022, content creators will produce more than 30% of their digital content with the aid of AI content-generation techniques.

Mahdi added: “What this means to security and risk management professionals is that our organisations are likely building solutions and making technology-related choices often without realising the risk implications of what they are doing.”

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