"Security Pros Anticipate Automation Will Reduce IT Security Headcount, but not Replace Human Expertise"
In a new survey conducted by DomainTools and Ponenom Institue, they found that many companies (77 percent) continue to use or plan to use automation in IT in the next three years. 51 percent of IT respondents believe that automation will decrease headcount in the IT security function, and 37 percent of IT employees believe that automation will cause them to lose their jobs. Overall, 74 percent of the participants agreed that automation enables IT security staff to focus on more severe vulnerabilities and overall network security. 74 percent of the participants say that automation is not capable of specific tasks done by IT security staff. The participants also believe that automation delivers productivity benefits such as reducing false positives and/or false negatives (43 percent), increasing the speed of analyzing threats (42 percent), and prioritizing threats and vulnerabilities (39 percent). The researchers also discovered that participants think that the most common activities likely to be replaced by automation in the next three years are log analysis (68 percent), threat hunting (60 percent), and DevOps (37 percent).