In the race against cyber threats, automation is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. But simply having automation isn’t enough. To truly strengthen your security posture, you need to understand how mature your automation capabilities are. This allows you to see where you stand, identify gaps, and chart a course for improvement.
Today, we’re diving deep into the Cybersecurity Automation Maturity Matrix, a framework designed to help you measure and advance your security program. Let’s get started.
Before we measure maturity, let’s define our terms. Drawing from IBM’s influential Cost of a Data Breach Report, security automation is the use of technology to augment or replace human intervention in containing incidents and intrusion attempts.
This doesn’t always mean a fully “hands-off” system. Automation exists on a spectrum, from tools that simply assist human analysts to systems that can operate almost entirely on their own. The key is using technology—from AI and machine learning to SOAR playbooks—to streamline parts of your security operations, especially detection and response.
Quantifying your automation level isn’t just an academic exercise; it has a direct impact on your bottom line and operational resilience. The data speaks for itself.
According to IBM’s research, organizations with fully deployed security automation see a massive difference compared to those with none:
Breach Identification & Containment: 249 days with full automation vs. 323 days with no automation. That’s 74 days saved.
Average Cost of a Breach: $2.90 million with full automation vs. $6.65 million with no automation. A cost difference of $3.75 million.
For critical infrastructure and industrial operations, the stakes are even higher. Downtime isn’t just an inconvenience; it’s a direct loss of productivity and revenue. Siemens reported in 2022 that the cost of downtime for automotive plants reached a staggering $2.1 million per hour, a 50% increase from two years prior. Effective automation can drastically reduce these outage periods, protecting both your systems and your revenue.
While cybersecurity lacks a standardized taxonomy for automation, we can find a powerful model in the automotive world. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) developed SAE J3016, a publication that defines six distinct levels of driving automation, from Level 0 (fully manual) to Level 5 (fully autonomous).
This framework provides a clear, universally understood way to classify a car’s capabilities. It specifies what the human does, what the car does, and how they interact. This clarity is precisely what’s missing in cybersecurity, where terms like “AI-powered” and “automated” are often used without a consistent definition. Adopting a similar model can help us move beyond vague marketing claims and focus on tangible capabilities.
To adapt the SAE’s success to our field, we propose a matrix built on three core pillars:
Scope: How comprehensive is the automation? This considers the data sources it can handle (host vs. network), the visibility it has across your environment, and which NIST Cybersecurity Framework functions (e.g., Detect, Respond) it supports.
Human Intervention: When does an analyst need to step in? This measures whether the system only raises alerts, suggests actions for human approval, or can execute response actions on its own.
Threat Sophistication: What level of adversary can the automation handle? This evaluates its ability to detect everything from known, low-level threats to sophisticated, “living-off-the-land” techniques and zero-day exploits.
Using these three pillars, we can define a six-level maturity model for cybersecurity automation.
This is the fully manual stage. Analysts use non-alerting tools like Wireshark or Event Log Viewer to process evidence.
Scope: Very narrow, tied to low volumes of data from one or two collection points (e.g., a single host or network segment).
Human Intervention: The human analyst does everything. The tools only present data; all interpretation and action rest on the analyst.
Threat Sophistication: Effective only for known, low-sophistication threats. Coverage is limited by the analyst’s personal experience and biases.
Here, automation helps by raising alerts for an analyst to investigate. The human is still responsible for all actions. Think of passive network security monitoring (NSM) tools, basic antivirus, and some EDR/XDR features.
Scope: Often limited to one function (like detection) and a few data types. The analyst must manually correlate data from different sources.
Human Intervention: The system flags potential issues (e.g., “this hash is bad” or “this file structure looks odd”), but the analyst must collect further data and decide on a response.
Threat Sophistication: Good for low-to-moderate known threats. Still requires a high time commitment from the analyst to find more advanced threats.
At this level, the automation is trusted to take certain, predefined response actions. This is the domain of most SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response) tools and playbooks.
Scope: Actions are typically limited to minimally destructive tasks like adding an IP to a blocklist, killing a connection, or isolating a host.
Human Intervention: The human is still in the driver’s seat. Many security teams trust their junior analysts more than their SOAR tools, highlighting that the system’s actions are still heavily monitored and double-checked.
Threat Sophistication: Handles low-to-moderate known threats well. MITRE ATT&CK® coverage improves, but the human-in-the-loop requirement means it’s still time-intensive.
This is a major leap forward. The automation can independently handle threat hunting, detection, and response in many situations but will defer to a human analyst when its confidence is low or the situation is outside its programming.
Scope: Requires both host and network data to make informed decisions. It can process data at a scale impossible for humans, analyzing terabytes or petabytes of traffic in near real-time.
Human Intervention: The human is moving out of the driver’s seat and into a supervisory role, only intervening in edge cases.
Threat Sophistication: Can now tackle moderate to high-sophistication threats. This is where you can start reliably finding unknown TTPs and tackling hard detection problems like sophisticated “living-off-the-land” attacks.
The automation is now fully responsible for prevention, detection, and response within a defined environment (e.g., a specific plant or network segment). It does not assume a human will intervene.
Scope: Requires a vast network of collection points and a highly efficient pipeline for collection, analysis, and response. Coverage is key.
Human Intervention: Minimal to none. The human role is primarily monitoring, not active intervention.
Threat Sophistication: Handles moderate and high-sophistication threats with near-complete MITRE ATT&CK® coverage. AI, ML, and advanced statistical methods are essential at this stage.
This is the “holy grail.” The automation works flawlessly in all environments and all situations with no limitations. No organization is here today.
Scope: Total visibility and control across all environments.
Human Intervention: None required.
Threat Sophistication: Proactively identifies threats by deeply understanding computer architecture and the “art of the possible” within operating systems—finding vulnerabilities before they’re even known. It can even adapt its models automatically as new OS patches are released.
Understanding your position on the Cybersecurity Automation Maturity Matrix is the first step toward building a more resilient, efficient, and proactive security program. By assessing your scope, level of human intervention, and ability to handle sophisticated threats, you can identify your weaknesses and strategically invest in the technology and processes needed to level up.
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