As businesses adapt to an ever-evolving threat and regulatory landscape, it is widely accepted that the next big challenge lies in scaling cybersecurity to keep pace. In fact, organizations have never experienced the volume, velocity, and severity of attacks that we witnessed in 2024 and are continuing to see in 2025. You only have to look at recent high-profile cyberattacks on major UK retailers and manufacturers to appreciate how devastating such attacks can be, with consequences rippling across entire sectors.
For example, a notable UK retailer was forced to suspend online sales for approximately six weeks, severely affecting its e-commerce operations, with the incident reportedly costing the company around £300 million. A vehicle manufacturer halted production at all UK and overseas factories, including Solihull, Wolverhampton, Slovakia, China, and India. It is believed that £1.7 billion worth of vehicles has not been produced, with an initial profit impact estimated at £120 million. Though the company’s strong financials may be able to absorb this, it is an unplanned and severe incident.
Turning Intelligence into Action
While the threat environment is undeniably severe, this volume of attacks also means individual organizations across industries are building a wealth of threat intelligence. However, the record number of attacks streaming in demands too much attention for security and SOC teams, who simply don’t have the bandwidth to capitalize on this valuable threat data. While we are seeing more threat intelligence sharing across internal and external parties, if teams are constantly in firefighting mode, it makes it hard for them to act on such intelligence.
From a threat intelligence perspective, cybersecurity automation is an essential tool for tackling manual jobs, freeing teams to focus on the human element within cybersecurity. It is vital in handling repetitive tasks like log monitoring, malware analysis, and alert triage, freeing up human analysts for more strategic, higher-value tasks. It enriches threat data with context, correlates events across systems, and executes response playbooks instantly.
Automation also supports vulnerability scanning, patch management, and threat hunting by establishing behavioral baselines and running hunt scripts. By streamlining the threat intelligence lifecycle, from data collection to dissemination, automation reduces response times, minimizes human error, and enables teams to use the threat intelligence shared with them and focus on adversary profiling, proactive defense, and high-level decision-making.
From Optional to Strategic Necessity
Consequently, cybersecurity automation has graduated from “nice to have” to essential. In fact, we have conducted research over the past five years to look at the growing importance of cybersecurity automation in organizations. Our 2024 report, ‘The Evolution of Cybersecurity Automation Adoption,’ showed that 80% of respondents said it was important. However, a sneak preview of our 2025 report, which is due out this autumn, highlights that not only has the importance of cybersecurity automation increased year-on-year, but this year it has shot up to 97%. This highlights the growing reliance on automated solutions to address complex security challenges.
For cybersecurity purposes, automation has three top use cases:
1. Incident Response: Rapid, automated responses to security events that reduce the window of vulnerability and prevent escalation.
2. Threat Hunting: Automation enables teams to analyze large datasets and uncover threats more efficiently.
3. Phishing Analysis: By automating the detection and analysis of phishing attempts, organizations can mitigate one of the most common attack vectors.
Evolving Mindsets and Metrics
Another key benefit of cybersecurity automation is that it helps reduce the workload on SOC and security teams, mitigating burnout and reducing employee churn in a field where skilled professionals are in high demand. Our 2024 report found that the top metric for evaluating cybersecurity automation’s success was team well-being. Automating manual tasks allows security teams to focus on more essential, high-value tasks, improving job satisfaction and enabling them to develop strategies to scale their response to match the accelerating threat landscape. This is where building threat intelligence sharing communities is essential because it enables organizations to develop industry-wide cybersecurity defenses. Automation can assist in quickly generating threat intelligence reports for sharing across siloed teams and organizations, effectively capitalizing on the increase in threat information and security teams’ time.
However, what we have seen in our 2025 research, largely due to the current volatile economic climate, is that we are witnessing a shift toward more tangible KPIs being demanded of cybersecurity automation. Unlike previous years when employee satisfaction was the main KPI, this has now slipped to third place, with ‘how well we are managing to do the job’ now sitting in first place. This could also be due to the fact that we are seeing automation mature, with a new net budget being allocated for it, and hence the need for sharper measurement metrics around it.
Building Autonomous Cybersecurity
Without a doubt, cybersecurity automation enables security teams and organizations to work smarter, not harder, to effectively meet the demands of the threat landscape. By integrating cybersecurity automation with collaborative intelligence efforts, organizations can enhance resilience, respond to threats more effectively, and safeguard assets in an increasingly hostile cyber landscape.
The imperative is clear: cybersecurity automation must be embedded not just as a tactical solution, but as a strategic enabler of resilience. Looking ahead with automation now becoming integral, organizations are starting to focus on how they can use AI-powered systems for cybersecurity detection and response. However, implementing AI across cybersecurity is presenting challenges, similar to those encountered during automation adoption.
Our analysis of cybersecurity automation maturity over the past five years provides valuable perspective on future AI implementation trends, as well as key challenges that cybersecurity professionals should anticipate, more insight around this can be found in our 2025 research, launching soon.
As threat volumes surge and regulatory pressures intensify, organizations that harness automation to scale defenses, share intelligence, and measure impact will be best positioned to thrive. Crucially, automation also lays the foundation for a form of cyber immunity using AI, where systems can self-detect, self-heal, and adapt to evolving threats without constant human intervention.
The shift from reactive firefighting to proactive, intelligence-led security is already underway, and automation and AI are the engines driving it. In this new era, success hinges not on how many threats are detected, but on how swiftly and autonomously they are neutralized. The future of cybersecurity isn’t just automated; it must be self-defending, collaborative, and built to endure.
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