64% of analysts spend more than half of their time on manual tasks. It’s a sobering reality, considering how accelerated detection has become, and the contrast couldn’t be sharper. There are tools that detect zero-day vulnerabilities, map complex attacks, and identify vendor risk exposures, but remediation is still stuck in the age of manual mitigation.

All of this is exacerbated by the lengthy handoffs, the endless flood of tickets, and the constant context switching that your team endures on a daily basis. It takes a handful of platforms to finally resolve a risk, leaving your team in a perpetual game of catch-up. This reactionary state is expensive, ineffective, and a drain on resources.

UpGuard’s answer is Risk Automations, our automation solution that connects security intelligence with system execution.

In this article, we explore the complexities of playing constant catch-up and how we are closing the loop with Risk Automations. We expand on how our solution works, detailing how it enables you to transition from system hopping to automated remediation.

The cost of catching up

The script is well-known. A critical vulnerability is discovered, or perhaps a third-party vendor fails an audit. The race to resolution begins, but your SOC team must contend with manual handoffs, endless copying and pasting, switching between dashboards, and context switching, all to close a single ticket.

It’s a laborious process, a chain of repetitive and fragmented steps. This process involves receiving an alert, gathering relevant information, switching platforms, identifying the right stakeholders, notifying them, assigning tasks, resolving the issue, closing the ticket, and manually verifying if the fix has resolved the issue.

The failure to close the loop quickly leads to alert fatigue and detection latency. Alert fatigue occurs when SOC professionals receive so many alerts that it becomes challenging to effectively prioritize and respond to them. The high volume of notifications can lead to desensitization, potentially causing important threats to be overlooked. Detection latency refers to the time it takes to identify a vulnerability and resolve it, leaving opportunities for exploitation during that period.

The consequence of this resolution drag is an ever-widening exploit window. As your team scrambles between the constant flow of repetitive tasks, the actual remediation time also starts to lag. Known risks remain open for longer, and the potential for a breach increases with every hour that they are unaddressed.

In fact, basic compliance requirements are not being met. CISA demands that critical vulnerabilities be remediated within 15 days, however, reports show that a significant percentage of the same critical flaws remain open for 30 days on average. That is one month of trying to normalize operations while manually moving data between siloed systems. The failure rate indicates that reactive risk remediation is failing teams, causing them to succumb to alert fatigue and unnecessary detection latency.

Fragmentation is slowing you down

Resolution drag and exploit windows are not the only issues with fragmented workflows. The industry is becoming increasingly reliant on “Frankenstacks,” collections of powerful but disconnected tools crammed together, with the hope of achieving efficiency.

Let’s set the scene: An analyst on your team is battling fragmentation on a day-to-day basis. They have found a critical misconfiguration. Now, they must jump through loops, check Dashboard 1 for the discovery, manually log into Dashboard 2, jump onto their communication tool to notify the engineering owner, and then log into Dashboard 3 for asset context. These tools do not speak to each other; every single connection attempt introduces friction and is prone to human error.

This is a reality because 84% of organizations' analysts unknowingly investigate the same incidents multiple times a month. The lack of integration, visibility, and automation is in itself a threat to security effectiveness. Your platforms may be connected, but they are not fully integrated. Proactive risk monitoring is the only way forward to resolving this, allowing your team to avoid the drain and refocus on strategy.

Introducing Risk Automations: Your resolution layer for risk

Risk Automations closes the gap between insight and action.

This solution makes “remediate” synonymous with “immediate”. It effectively automates discovery, notification, and remediation by connecting your security stack to system APIs, delivering immediate, measurable action on every identified risk, and ushering in a truly proactive security posture.

This capability integrates with the platforms, products, and tools you rely on most, including ServiceNow, Jira, Cloudflare, Splunk, and Slack—via their respective APIs. Users can build custom, node-based automation workflows, using a visual editor, or get up and running with a library of vetted templates that cover everyday manual remediation tasks.

How does Risk Automations work?

Risk Automations has three functional pillars, each designed to offset any manual labor that usually prevents your SOC team from operating at speed, scale, and precision.

Automated resolution provides immediate action

Relying on email and ticket queues to resolve business-critical issues is inefficient, especially in today’s complex and adversarial threat landscape. Risk Automations directly address this by providing automated resolution that connects risk intelligence directly to system execution (for instance, Jira or ServiceNow APIs). This remediates risks immediately, eliminating the need for manual ticketing.

When a critical risk is identified, Risk Automations can execute a defined action, reducing the time from discovery to remediation to mere seconds. These actions can include automatically forcing a password rotation in an identity platform, turning off a high-risk cloud service, initiating a security review, or triggering an asset patch in ServiceNow.

Seamless connectivity eliminates manual work

The days of jumping between five different interfaces to process one event are over. Risk Automations offers seamless connectivity to eliminate manual work, integrating all your critical tools and data sources, so you can move from a “Frankenstack” to a cohesive, automated security core.

This eliminates the manual overhead of copying, pasting, and context-switching with an integrated stack and seamless workflow, ensuring data accuracy and reliable handoffs between teams. For instance, you can configure a workflow to automatically extract vendor information from a questionnaire and post it to a Slack channel for review, or ingest threat intelligence from Splunk and automatically map it to an affected asset.

Targeted visibility cuts through the noise

Alert fatigue and Frankenstacks are two sides of the same problem. As stacks increase and become more fragmented, the torrent of alerts becomes unmanageable. 51% of professionals report feeling overwhelmed by the number of alerts they face, and this number increases as it flows down to the actual engineers on the ground.

Targeted visibility solves this by filtering and surfacing data, making sure the correct information reaches the right people without delay. There’s no manual work involved in delivering targeted visibility to various stakeholders (security, legal, and leadership). These reports can be tailored to specific audiences, automatically push a detailed Jira ticket to engineering, or generate a high-level summary for Slack leadership. Additionally, they can be used to create scheduled reports on vendors that meet unfavorable score qualifications.

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Proactive command gives you complete control

Risk Automations does more than give you time back. It provides you with absolute command over your security posture, backed by around-the-clock coverage.

This enables immediate action, eliminates manual work, and reduces alert fatigue and detection latency across the attack surface. Additionally, this resolution layer delivers substantial returns on mitigation, with global automated security operations estimated to result in annual cost savings of $1.9 million for large organizations.

The most significant benefit of Risk Automations is the freedom it provides, allowing your team to stop chasing risk and instead start commanding resolution. By focusing on strategy, you can push past the old way of doing business. Risk Automations allows you to leave manual remediation behind. Your team is no longer defined by the tickets they close, but by the threats they proactively eliminate.

Go from hours of remediation to seconds. Risk Automations is available for Early Access. Register today to secure your spot and start automating your resolution layer.