Time To Automation (TTA): The single most important security metric for 2025

Slow automation - not just a process gap but your security team’s biggest vulnerability

The Security Reality: Challenges Facing Security Teams

Security teams are losing the battle - the global shortfall of 4 million skilled cybersecurity professionals is leaving organizations critically understaffed and the shortage is further expected to rise to 85 million workers by 2030. 

SOAR platforms are no longer able to keep up with the pace of attacks, considering that they require teams with specialized coding and scripting skills to create and maintain complex workflows. Traditional SOAR playbooks are often outdated even before deployment, making it impossible to stay ahead. 

The odds are brutal - Attackers only need one success while defenders need to win each time. This asymmetry makes it nearly impossible for security teams to keep up with new attacks. Organizations need a faster and smarter way to defend against evolving threats and manual interventions simply cannot keep up with the pace.  

The Importance of Time to Automation

Security teams are often judged on Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) but the single most important metric for security teams to focus on is Time to Automation (TTA).  

Speed determines survival. The faster you can automate, the more you can stay ahead of the attackers. If it takes months or even weeks to automate a workflow, you've already lost.

The speed at which the team can react can mean the difference between a minor incident and a catastrophic breach. It is also instrumental in staying proactive and hardening the defenses upfront. Organizations that automate their security processes can reduce the time to respond to threats by up to 99.999%. Automated workflows can open tickets, enrich data with contextual information, and prioritize vulnerabilities based on risk. 

Start by measuring and creating a baseline of 5 core metrics involved in your current process to build automation:

1. Ideation: Time to ideate a workflow to detect and/or prevent a new threat
2. Implementation: Time from idea to implementation of the workflow
3. Testing: Time to simulate the scenario and test the workflow efficacy 
4. MTTR: Time to detect and respond to the new threat
5. ROI: Hours saved by automated actions

As you start on your efforts to accelerate your TTA, keep track of the metrics, measuring and improving them continuously.

The Pivotal Shift in 2025: Embracing AI-Powered Automation

So, how can security teams achieve the fastest TTA?  

The answer lies in smaller, highly skilled teams of security professionals who can design, implement, and manage workflows very quickly rather than perform manual tasks. 

With AI-powered automation, a single security security professional with automation tools can achieve rapid automation compared to a team of 100 security professionals. According to (ISC)s 2024 Workforce Study, the role of security professionals is rapidly evolving, with 68% of organizations planning to increase their focus on security automation skills. This is a game-changer for organizations struggling to fill cybersecurity roles.

Today’s cybersecurity challenges - from AI-driven attacks to the global skills gap highlight the urgent need for AI-driven automation - no longer a luxury but a necessity. 

In 2025, the cybersecurity industry will witness a paradigm shift with the adoption of AI agents and Large Language Models (LLMs) that enable organizations to generate workflows in a fraction of the time it previously took. At Blink Ops, we've seen 10x-100x TTA compared to current solutions.

Organizations need to embrace innovation to not only protect their organizations but also to gain a competitive edge in an increasingly hostile digital world. For any organization, Time To Automation should be the single critical metric in determining how quickly they can transform their security operations to meet tomorrow's threats.

Blink: Time to Automation in seconds, not Months

Blink is the first cloud-native, AI-driven security automation no code platform leading this transformation. Unlike traditional SOAR systems, Blink is built from the ground up to leverage LLMs and AI agents to build automated security flows extremely quickly without the need to hire a specialized workforce that is hard to find. This allows organizations to:

• Generate automation in seconds instead of months.
• Democratize automation and eliminate the need for large engineering teams
• Adapt to new threats with unprecedented agility.

Blink’s ability to deploy workflows in minutes, rather than months, ensures that security teams can respond to threats in real time. The time to act is now—explore how Blink can empower your team, enhance your defenses, and prepare you for the security threats of today.