Despite automated threat detection and protection, companies are still short on staff to actually deal with threats once they are found. Unless automation can pick up the slack, the skill gap will continue to leave companies vulnerable.

That’s according to Muddu Sudhakar (pictured), senior vice president and general manager at ServiceNow Inc. “I think the area of threat detection, threat protection, is old; there’s nothing new there,” he told John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s live streaming studio, during the RSA Conference in San Francisco. They spoke at theCUBE’s Palo Alto studio on Wednesday.

“What people don’t have is people,” Sudhakar said, referring to the dearth of cybersecurity workers at most companies. He said that what companies are seeking is called security operations or SecOps. Its chief aim is to automate the security response, and it is the next hot area in security, he believes.

Sudhakar also thinks that SecOps is best delivered in the cloud as a SaaS application. “If you want to do this instant response, you’re going to have people all over the world or maybe you’ll have virtual agents doing this workflow automation,” he said. “That’s where ServiceNow makes sense,” he argued, saying its ability to orchestrate disparate operations makes it ideal for the job.

He said that interest in SecOps is showing up in the conversations at the RSA Conference. “The only new thing this year, I would say, is doing machine learning for the workflow, automation and orchestration,” Sudhakar said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RSA Conference 2017.

Photo by SiliconANGLE