If you work in Government agencies or as a contractor, you feel the pressure to do more with less every day. Security teams in particular have to reduce response times despite limited staff and resources.
Cybersecurity automation gives a practical way to manage these tasks without relying on constant hiring. Two core compliance frameworks that shape this work for you are the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Cybersecurity Framework and the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC).
NIST organizes cybersecurity activities into five functions: Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover. Meanwhile, CMMC defines maturity levels and specific practices across domains, such as access control, auditing and incident response. Let’s explore three cybersecurity automation strategies that help organizations strengthen their defense.
Why Cybersecurity Automation Is Important
For security teams, a typical day revolves around manual triage, status chasing and spreadsheet maintenance. Cybersecurity automation changes it by pulling live data from your systems to maintain current asset and risk inventories. This happens without asking people to update information by hand.
Under NIST’s Identify function, this means you can see where your critical assets live and how they change over time. On the other hand, the Protect function benefits from automated patching, network segmentation and access monitoring that do not depend on someone remembering to run a script.
Cybersecurity automation also strengthens access control. It enables security professionals to manage who joins, moves and leaves networks and critical systems. At the same time, it keeps user privileges aligned with each user’s role.
This automation handles all your repeatable tasks, allowing you and your teams to spend more time on strategic risk decisions instead of routine checks. You can easily keep pace with security requirements even when the headcount is tight.
Three Ways Cybersecurity Automation Reduces Risks
The main purpose of automating cybersecurity is to minimize threats and speed up recovery and incident response times. Below are three cybersecurity automation strategies that help achieve that:
Staff shortages directly or indirectly impact almost every step of your security process. This also includes your ability to watch for threats around the clock. With manual scans and periodic log reviews, your team is more likely to leave gaps that adversaries can take advantage of.
Cybersecurity automation closes those gaps by running continuous monitoring and correlating logs across your security operations center. It also surfaces patterns, such as unusual data transfers or login behaviors, that deserve a closer look. This lines up directly with the Detect function of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, which emphasizes the timely discovery of cybersecurity events.
Automated anomaly detection can learn what “normal” looks like in your environment and instantly flag deviations for investigation. Your analysts don’t have to stare at dashboards all day. This way, you give your security operations greater depth without adding more people to the roster.
Additionally, CMMC strengthens this need through the AU (Audit and Accountability) domain. It expects systematic collection, protection and review of audit logs. Automation can collect and timestamp events, retain them according to policy and perform first-level analysis to find suspicious sequences. If you work in Government services, this type of threat detection raises your confidence that your team won’t miss any meaningful events.
Faster Incident Response and Recovery
Security teams feel the need for more staff members, especially when something goes wrong. A strong incident response plan only helps if you can execute it quickly and consistently.
Cybersecurity automation brings that plan into action by triggering playbooks as soon as a qualifying event occurs. The automated system instantly isolates affected systems, blocks malicious IP addresses and starts forensics workflows without waiting for someone to manually coordinate the steps.
NIST’s Respond and Recover functions call for well-defined processes that you can rely on during stressful situations. With automation in place, regular backups can be created and tested according to schedule. It also makes sure recovery takes place before systems return to production and that every step is logged for later review.
CMMC’s IR (Incident Response) domain expects this level of definition and documentation. This is much easier to achieve via automation than phone calls or ad hoc emails.
Compliance Made More Manageable
Agencies and contractors working in regulated environments must show that they consistently follow their stated controls. NIST SP 800-53 includes controls that can be supported through cybersecurity automation, such as CA-7 for continuous monitoring. It runs assessments on a defined cadence and produces standardized reports for reviewers.
For security teams, this means they can rely on their automation solutions to maintain an up-to-date record of control performance.
CMMC evaluates maturity across Risk Assessment (RA) and Security Assessment (CA) domains. Automation can help you bring together threat, vulnerability and asset information to support cybersecurity activities without adding new layers of manual work. These include objective risk scoring, tracking remediation activities and monitoring third-party risks.
This automates the flow of information and helps security teams, auditors and compliance leaders easily interpret the results. You still own the decisions, but security automation makes it much easier to show how your program aligns with compliance requirements.
Choosing the Right Cybersecurity Automation Platform
If you’ve already started planning to put these strategies into practice, you may still be wondering which security automation platform to choose. As a general rule of thumb, look for a solution that:
- Connects to your existing cybersecurity technology, tools and processes
- Supports a range of users, from CISOs and risk officers to analysts and auditors
- Offers no-code or low-code options, as they allow security teams to design and adjust workflows without requiring many development resources
- Aligns with your long-term Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) strategy while giving you quick wins in log review, alert triage, incident response and control testing
- Ties with NIST and CMMC requirements
- Comes with strong reporting and user experiences
Onspring offers all these features to security teams. Their no-code GRC platform connects risk, compliance and audit data so you can manage policies, assessments and issues in one place.
The platform has strong social proof. Their customers report saving up to 70% of the time they once spent managing policies, consolidating 12% of their applications and improving overall business efficiency by 33%.
Onspring also automates repetitive tasks and displays everything on spreadsheets and dashboards for easy collaboration. It also has GovCloud support for Government environments, which enables CISOs, auditors and security teams to manage security-related functions on autopilot.
Connect with Onspring’s team to understand how their cybersecurity automation capabilities can reduce risks in diverse environments.
Discover How Automation Reduces Cybersecurity Risks
- Read our White Paper on Why No-Code Automation is the Future for Federal Agencies
- Check out our blog on 3 Powerful GRC Automation Examples
- Contact us to get a free demo of the platform
Carahsoft Technology Corp. is The Trusted Government IT Solutions Provider, supporting Public Sector organizations across Federal, State and Local Government agencies and Education and Healthcare markets. As the Master Government Aggregator for our vendor partners, including Onspring, we deliver solutions for Geospatial, Cybersecurity, MultiCloud, DevSecOps, Artificial Intelligence, Customer Experience and Engagement, Open Source and more. Working with resellers, systems integrators and consultants, our sales and marketing teams provide industry leading IT products, services and training through hundreds of contract vehicles. Explore the Carahsoft Blog to learn more about the latest trends in Government technology markets and solutions, as well as Carahsoft’s ecosystem of partner thought-leaders.
