Dr. Deepak Kumar is Founder and CEO of Adaptiva, a leading endpoint management platform.

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In cybersecurity, many leaders use the terms "automation" and "autonomy" interchangeably, but that is inaccurate. Automation accelerates execution, while autonomy reduces the need for manual coordination. ​

Understanding the difference is increasingly important as attack timelines compress and pressure mounts on organizations to remediate vulnerabilities faster and more consistently. ​

My company's analysis of 209 enterprise IT and security professionals surveyed between July and September 2025 found that the percentage of organizations deploying patches within six days rose from 15% in 2023 to 59% in 2026, suggesting that automation and process modernization are beginning to translate into measurable operational gains.

Despite this progress, 56% of organizations still feel exposed to known vulnerabilities.​ If organizations are patching faster than ever, why do so many still feel at risk?

Why Faster Patching Does Not Eliminate Risk

The answer is that automation alone does not eliminate the coordination challenges and manual handoffs that slow remediation down.

Many organizations have invested in automation yet still rely on governance structures, approval processes and ownership models designed for a slower threat environment, creating barriers between detection and action.

As a result, prolonged exposure continues to increase risk.​ As attack response windows shorten and environments become more complex, operational maturity becomes a key differentiator. The most mature organizations are not asking whether they have automation but how close they are to autonomy.​​

What Automation Has Done For Us So Far

For over two decades, automation has enabled organizations to accelerate individual security tasks like running vulnerability scans, deploying patches at scale and generating, routing and prioritizing tickets with minimal manual effort. ​

These capabilities have delivered significant efficiency gains and remain fundamental to modern security operations. However, the speed needed to respond to increasingly fast and sophisticated threats demands more consistent and efficient execution across entire workflows.​

Modern enterprise environments are much more distributed than they were a decade ago, and the attack surface is expanding, with security teams managing remote endpoints, multiple operating systems, cloud services and third-party applications. When patching in these environments, organizations can no longer afford processes that stall while waiting for approvals, maintenance windows or coordination across teams before remediation starts. ​​

While automation improves individual processes, these often still require human approvals, cross-functional coordination and manual intervention. A vulnerability may be detected automatically, yet prioritization, testing, approval and remediation may still involve multiple teams and handoffs. ​

As a result, organizations can misidentify automated tasks as operational maturity. Automating a workflow does not necessarily mean the organization can respond consistently at the speed modern threats require.

Where Autonomous Operations Come In

Autonomy reduces bottlenecks by enabling systems to move from detection to decision and execution with minimal manual effort while still operating within predefined guardrails. ​

In practice, those guardrails might include automatically prioritizing patches based on vulnerability severity, deploying updates to a small number of noncritical devices before broader rollout or requiring administrator approval for high-risk changes while allowing routine updates to process autonomously.

With the guardrails in place, autonomous operations focus on orchestrating outcomes across an entire workflow rather than automating individual tasks. ​

Organizations might feel as though they have achieved autonomy because individual processes are automated. In reality, remediation still pauses while security teams validate results, IT schedules maintenance windows or multiple stakeholders approve deployment. Manual coordination points can slow execution even when the core tasks themselves are automated. ​​

As attackers operate at machine speed, the gap between automation and autonomy is most evident between detection and remediation, where vulnerabilities may be identified automatically, but turning those insights into action still requires coordination across multiple teams, tools and approval processes.​

My company's survey mentioned above found that 74% of organizations cite coordination between vulnerability detection and remediation as a significant challenge. Detection, testing, approval and deployment may each be partially automated, but delays can still emerge as information moves between systems and stakeholders. This helps explain why organizations can patch faster while still feeling exposed to risk.

Today, most enterprises operate somewhere between manual processes and full autonomy. While portions of security operations are automated, key decisions still require human intervention, leaving leaders to identify the remaining operational friction.​

How To Assess Your Cybersecurity Maturity

​In my experience, organizations often assess maturity by counting automated tools, workflows or processes. While these metrics offer insight, they may overlook bottlenecks that emerge when security teams still rely on manual approvals or cross-functional coordination before remediation begins. ​

A more meaningful assessment identifies where operational friction remains and whether governance supports rapid execution. Approval chains, fragmented ownership and outdated change policies can unintentionally delay remediation and extend exposure.

How many manual handoffs occur between detection and remediation? Where do approvals cause delays? Can routine security decisions be executed consistently and safely without extensive coordination? ​

These questions offer a clearer view of operational maturity than automation metrics alone. Organizations making the most progress typically start by automating routine, repeatable decisions while maintaining human oversight for more sensitive ones. Attempting to automate everything at once can introduce unnecessary risk and reduce confidence in autonomous operations. ​

The Next Stage Of Cybersecurity Maturity

While automation has transformed cybersecurity operations and will remain essential, the capability alone is not the end goal.

As threats become more dynamic and response times shrink, organizations must focus on a broader shift in both accelerating tasks and reducing operational friction across workflows.​

The next stage of cybersecurity maturity involves enabling autonomous execution, where routine decisions, prioritization and remediation occur quickly, consistently and within clearly defined guardrails. The challenge is whether leaders are willing to redesign operating models that still depend on human-speed coordination in a machine-speed threat environment.​

Organizations that understand the distinction between automation and autonomy will be better positioned to reduce risk, improve resilience and succeed in an increasingly automated threat landscape.

Operational maturity is not measured by the number of automated tools in place but by the organization's ability to execute consistently when speed matters most. For security leaders, the question should be how close the organization is to operational autonomy.

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