How Modern Productivity Software Can Help Your Security Operation Team?

Technology is increasing rapidly and is making the life of users more comfortable day by day. There are apps that can do everything you can send messages in an instant using emails and WhatsApp, you can make a full to-do day list by using a to-do app and adding reminders, and you can manage the whole workflow of your organization using project management or work management software. 

The thing is that we have an app or software for almost everything, but still there are many possibilities of improving the technology that we have. 

This is when the project proposal of automation walked into the scene and made our life and work easy. We have apps and software to do many things, but the idea is many times we have to do many things ourselves, and to improve this situation, we can use automation or productivity software.

The automation with workflow management software gives businesses a number of benefits: reduced costs, improved workload, more process control, and transparency, as well as sustainability and readiness for changes.

Let’s take an example. Suppose you are into a laptop repairing business and you get leads from different sites like IndiaMART and so on and also via direct calls. Now you may have someone to take all the leads, someone that will go to the address to pick up the laptop and bring it to you, and someone to repair the laptop, so how will you manage the process?

First, the person that takes all the leads will log in to IndiaMART and they will see all the leads. Then if you use some project management app, they will create the task according to the project scope and will assign it to the pick-up boy, and then he will go to pick up the mobile, and then he will give the mobile to the engineer and will assign the task to him.

But do you really think that there should be a person to take all the leads and create tasks?

Well, why has an employee done the repetitive task of taking the leads and creating the task when the computer can do it? This is like having a person do the plus and minus when you have a calculator.

This is the reason why the world was taken by a force when the app orchestration solution IFTTT was launched, and over one million tasks were created in just seven months. It allowed the users to automate anything that they can think of and thus was a huge time-saver. 

This way, apps like Zapier and Integromat can help you by fetching the leads from sites like IndiaMart and can create the task and assign it to the pick-up boy. Well, in fact, these kinds of software can automate every process according to your project objective.

The world is loving these software applications and is using them for millions of processes.

Few reasons why people choose automation software applications:

1) Improved employee productivity:

The most significant disadvantage that your employees face is inefficient and disjoint systems. This is the reason that leads to optimum level performance. Repetitive tasks are tedious, and they can harm the productivity of the employee. 

Tasks like manually transferring customer data from one system to another can increase errors and reduce the overall agility of your company. According to a study, adopting NetSuite helped one manufacturer reduce the order processing time by 66%. 

Good Read- How To Embrace [Remote Working For Security Teams]

 

2) Real-time visibility:

Ever happened when you wanted to see the complete data, but the data entry work was still pending?

This doesn’t let you see the real-time position and can be frustrating. When companies have to deal with multiple systems and apps, this kind of situation arises. This prevents you from taking quick and accurate decisions based on the data. 

But, if you use productivity software, it can help you by entering all the data and thus saving countless-hours for you. 

3) Lower IT costs:

A lot of time, energy, and money are wasted on maintaining and updating siloed business systems and applications. 

A simple solution is using productivity software, and thus you can save time, energy, and money, and the software will maintain and update all the data. This way you can automate all the processes that can be done by computer and you can allocate your human resources to the processes that require human abilities and interaction.

4) Lower customer churn:

The only thing that helps in retaining customers is by providing the best possible customer experience. This is one of the features of productivity software as it can help you in customer project execution.

Productivity software can ensure that customers can access their data anywhere, avoid inventory sync issues, and get their issues resolved quickly—all these help in satisfying your customers. 

5) User-driven innovation:

You can make changes and implement improvements very quickly by using productivity software.

You can create tailor-made workflows that support optimal performance, and you can use your functional expertise to spot and address performance issues. These software programs are easy to use, and automation can be changed as and when you want. 

All these features have resulted in millions of users using such software applications around different niches, but so far, security operations have used them the least.

How productivity software can help the security operations team?

1) Streamline workflow:

It is seen that most of the time, cloud security failure is the result of a user's actions. 

SOC depends on apps to get data about user behavior, malware instructions, and compliance, but the main thing here is that these apps don’t speak the same language.

They have to manage all the data and feed in information manually. Automating can help you in gathering all the information in one place, and thus it can save you from the dull and tiring work of data management and entry.

2) Automate manual tasks:

Human talent should be used to analyze the data and decision making. But, companies are wasting such talent on manual tasks rather than strategically applying their expertise. 

Let’s take emails, for example. Analysts have to jump from system to system to test email content for malicious attachments. They have to phish URLs or suspicious requests for sensitive information. While if you use productivity software, you can automate this process and you can use analysts’ expertise on the tasks that actually require it. 

3) Increase response time:

You can automate all the processes that can be automated, and thus you can focus on the main tasks. This will help you by freeing your time for essential tasks.

Incident response teams fall behind in daily tasks of combing alerts, prioritizing problems, and responding to threads. It is possible to automate these tasks. If you automate these tasks, you can be far ahead in the project roadmap from the attackers, and thus you can win.

4) Integrate tools:

The main factor that slows you down is using apps that do not integrate with each other. This is like playing a jigsaw puzzle when you can have it solved by the computer. You have to jump from app to app to gather the information and piece it together. 

You can use productivity software, and thus you can save hours of needless labor. 

5) Take coding out of the picture:

The biggest reason behind the success of productivity tools is that it excludes the coding from your project scheduling, i.e. you don't have to be a developer to set the automation. Anyone can set the automation. 

Now you don’t have to beg your developers to find time for custom code workflows and integrations. You can do it yourself, and you are ready with a system that can help in speeding all your processes and in increasing your productivity.

 

            Appknox Free Trial

Published on Jul 9, 2020
Shyamal Parikh
Written by Shyamal Parikh
Shyamal is the Founder of SmartTask, an online work management tool that's helping teams be more productive by having clarity on who's doing what by when. Has a penchant for researching and sharing strategies that could benefit a team's productivity.

Questions?

Chat With Us

Using Other Product?

Switch to Appknox

2 Weeks Free Trial!

Get Started Now