What do you like best about the product?

Blink is, above anything else, flexible. This is an incredibly important attribute for an automation/orchestration platform, because it's impossible to anticipate every way a user might want to leverage the platfrom to solve their business needs. This flexibility could be a detriment and create for a heavy, cumbersome, or confusing system, but Blink's approach makes it considerably easier than expected. With just a few clicks, new connections can be created, new steps can be added, and full workflows can be built intuitively (not to mention the Blink Copilot that can take a narrative description of a workflow and create a template to start with - huge timesaver!). The other aspect of an automation/orchestration platfrom is integration, and Blink's approach is both easy and flexible. Creating reusable, secure connections from Blink to the various tools and platforms it integrates with is straightforward and simple. Further, Blink's "Runner" architecture means you can have certain connections that only live within your own environment (vs. leveraging Blink's cloud) - just another example of the flexibility and thoughtful approach Blink takes to this space. Lastly, I have to comment on Blink's support and customer success teams, who are absolutely top of the line. Since implementing Blink, we've worked closely with their technical support teams to make sure we're able to get the most value out of the product. This ranges from support in creating workflows, to tracking down bug fixes, to guidance and ideas on new workflows. Our "time to market" on any given automation idea is drastically reduced as a result of this support, which is incredibly valuable.

What do you dislike about the product?

Blink is an organization and platform that is rapidly growing and evolving, which sometimes shows in things like documentation. While support is outstanding, it can be frustrating when attempting to self-serve (really the intended operating model) when the documentation is missing or just not complete enough to actually get the job done. Sometimes, this means going and digging into the API documentation for the tool/platform you're running actions against to better understand how it's supposed to work. That said, the Blink team is always willing to step in and help answers questions and get things working!

What problems is the product solving and how is that benefiting you?

First and foremost, Blink is providing the ability to integrate and automate workflows and actions across the vast and varied operating environment used by our security organization. It allows us to recognize additional value from these security platforms and tools and how they can interoperate. The primary benefit we're getting is in the speed, efficiency, and consistency with which we can act in the context of those security tools, platforms, and events. It allows us to shift time and effort for repeatable, predictable tasks from our analysts and allow them to remained focus on the higher-order tasks they accel at.

In addition to the core automation/orchestration problems and value, we're also using Blink to address overall workflow management in the context of cybersecurity incident analysis and response. How do we keep track of incident response actions, tasks, decisions, and outcomes. This allows us to create a record and repository of those events to further enhance our defensive posture, analysis, and response capabilities.