Last updated at Mon, 04 Dec 2017 19:48:32 GMT

Komand’s mission is to help security operations teams connect their disparate systems, and automate all the tedious tasks between them — a process that’s typically done manually by security analysts today. These tasks and processes are time-intensive, and don’t always need a human involved. Security orchestration and automation is a natural fit, but integrating tools and automating processes hasn’t always been feasible, let alone easy. This is why Komand was founded.

A year ago, we launched our private beta program. In January, we announced our GA release. As an agile team and customer-driven organization, we’re constantly building new features and enhancing the product based on user feedback, and the experience of our veteran product and cybersecurity team.

We’re also a design-driven organization, which means the user experience and the usability of our product is a top priority. We want Komand to be the fastest and easiest way to orchestrate and automate your tools and process without writing code. That’s right, no code required.

We ship early and often to get cutting-edge features to our customers. And while we have shipped awesome features over the past year, we haven’t really talked about it much here on the blog. All of that is about to change.

In April, we’ll begin our feature update blog series to show you all the goodness that Komand is shipping to customers every month. But before we start that series, we felt it was proper to actually highlight some of our favorite features that currently exist in the product today.

Let’s take a look at some of these features, with insight from the team.

Human Decision Points

While you can fully automate decisions based on easy-to-add logic, sometimes you just need human insight during an investigation. With our human decision feature, a workflow will pause until a person evaluates the data and decides the correct course of action. This makes adding custom automation flexible to the unique needs of your company.

“It’s an oldie, but goodie. Not everything can be automated, so when you need insight from an actual person, this feature comes in handy.”
James

Importing Plugins from Komunity

With the launch of our plugin marketplace, we made sharing plugins between Komand users much easier. Getting those plugins into the product is super simple, too! When you’re in the product, you can choose to import directly from the Komunity marketplace. While going through the process, you’ll also see the plugins you already have, so you’re not duplicating integrations. Finally, when a plugin has an upgrade — say a new trigger or action is available — you’ll get an alert, and you can download the updated plugin right in the product.

“Such a slick and easy way to share plugins.”
Sean

Workflow Testing

You’re building a workflow to automate all the things between your systems and tools. You’re ready to activate your new workflow, but you want to make sure there are no errors. Enter workflow testing!

With workflow testing, you can not only validate your workflow right in the workflow builder, but you’ll get a preview of how the workflow will execute in a real-life setting, as well as the format of the data output.

“Testing a workflow before activating it makes validating so much easier. This cut my workflow building time in half.”
Jen

Artifacts

When a workflow executes, it creates a job. A job is all the data output, or an audit log, of that particular workflow execution. Sometimes that data can be extensive, and sifting through it to find correlation and meaning can become tedious and overwhelming.

We introduced artifacts as a customizable way for Komand users to format the output of their workflow in any way they want. Artifacts are also used throughout Komand, so creating them comes in handy.

“Artifacts bring order to job details. Instead of viewing all output, you get these nice little bits of readable information.”
Ross

Looping

If you’ve got a list of items that you want to perform the same actions on, it makes sense to do this in one fell swoop, right? Otherwise, you’re stuck performing that action on each item, no matter how many there are. This is an area where looping shines. With looping, you can repeat a variable over as many steps as you’d like. You can use the concept of “while” loops to continue circling back until a condition is met. Oh, and don’t forget you can add loops without writing a single line of code. 👍

“This makes looping data over multiple steps so much faster. I also like the way it’s displayed in the UI!”
Jon

Snippets and Templates

We’re all about removing the barriers to automation. With reusable elements like snippets and templates, users can reuse elements that they have already created within their workflows. Additionally, Komand launches with several prominent templates — email phishing investigations, chatops alerting, and data enrichment — so getting started with us is a breeze. Rumor also has it we’ll soon be adding these to our Komunity marketplace, so you can grab community-contributed workflow elements, and build your automation _without reinventing the wheel.

_

“Adding automation fast is our thing. Snippets and templates take this to the next level by allowing you to reuse pieces when you're building workflows.”
Gwen

The Dashboard

When you login to the product, what’s the first thing you need to do? With our dashboard, you’ll know when you see “Action Required”. This includes the human decisions that are currently pending, as well as any failed jobs. You’ll also catch a glimpse of the time Komand’s security orchestration and automation platform has saved you, as well as details on tasks automated, current number of integrations, and the ratio between human and automated decisions.

“I get a high-level overview of what I need to do and the ROI Komand is giving back to me. My favorite widgets are time saved and number of tasks automated.”
Kee Kee

Lots of Plugins

Integrations are a tough subject for many products. Not only do most products not integrate out-of-the-box with other products, but building integrations is often up to the product team that’s looking to connect. This contributes to the overall “disparate tools and systems” problem. Komand already has 119 plugins and integrations, with 250+ actions -- that’s over 250 individual tasks that you can automate! We’re also adding, on average, 3 new plugins a week, and we make it easy for security teams to build their own integrations with our Python and Go plugin SDKs.

“I just love our hundreds of plugins. I love how often we’re adding more, too. This really helps teams automate anything they need to.”
Jim

Removing the Friction for Security Orchestration and Automation

Of course, these aren't the only features that help our customers build automation fast, and respond to incidents even faster. We're also working on a few much-anticipated features, and we're excited to share those updates with you soon. Stay tuned for our April feature update!