Tines

What is Tines?

Tines is the intelligent workflow platform engineered to serve as the secure, reliable integration layer for modern work, transforming automation pilots into successful, scalable deployments across organizations. It empowers security and IT teams to orchestrate complex processes by seamlessly connecting disparate tools, integrating custom agents, and leveraging universal AI copilot capabilities. The platform is built on the principle of providing robust governance and guardrails while maintaining the flexibility needed to automate tasks ranging from critical incident response to routine IT operations.

Unlike traditional, rigid automation tools, Tines offers a vendor-agnostic approach, allowing teams to integrate everything from LLMs and MCPs to proprietary internal systems. This flexibility ensures that as technology stacks evolve, the core automation foundation remains stable. Tines transforms fragmented processes constrained by outdated systems into streamlined, intelligent workflows, driving significant business impact by reducing risk, eliminating tech debt, and saving substantial amounts of manual work time.

Key Features

• Flexible Workflow Builder (Storyboard): An intuitive, visual interface that allows teams of all technical levels to design, build, and collaborate on complex automation sequences, feeling more like solving a fun puzzle than traditional coding.
• Universal AI Copilot (Workbench): Integrates AI capabilities directly into workflows, enabling agents to perform complex tasks like data enrichment, decision-making, and interactive responses within a guided process.
• Powerful Case Management: Provides dedicated structures for security and IT incidents, offering high visibility into case metrics, SLA tracking (TTO/TTR), and detailed historical context for every automated or human-driven action.
• Vendor-Agnostic Integration Layer: Securely connects across the entire technology stack, supporting webhooks, APIs, LLMs, and custom tools, ensuring that automation is not limited by tool vendor constraints.
• Born in Security (Governance & Guardrails): Built with security teams in mind, the platform enforces necessary governance, monitoring, and audit trails across every surface of the workflow, ensuring compliance and control at scale.
• Agent Integration: Allows for the deployment and management of custom agents to extend automation capabilities into areas that traditional integrations might not reach.

How to Use Tines

Getting started with Tines involves leveraging its intuitive visual builder to map out desired processes. First, users define the trigger event (e.g., an incoming alert, a scheduled time, or a manual request). Next, they use the Storyboard interface to drag and drop 'Actions'—representing connections to tools like Okta, CrowdStrike, or custom APIs—and define the logic between them. This often involves data transformation steps to extract relevant information (like email addresses from an alert) before passing it to the next step.

For complex scenarios, the AI Copilot can be integrated to assist in decision-making or data lookups, creating interactive stories where human input is required for confirmation or complex analysis. Finally, workflows are tested, governed, and deployed. The platform excels at supporting both fully automated agentic workflows and human-driven interactive processes, ensuring that even complex, multi-step tasks are executed consistently and quickly, often reducing process time from minutes down to seconds.

Use Cases

1. Security Operations Center (SOC) Automation (SOAR Replacement): Automating the triage, enrichment, and response to high-volume security alerts (e.g., phishing reports, malware detections). Tines can automatically pull context from multiple sources (IP reputation, user details) and execute containment actions, significantly reducing Mean Time to Respond (MTTR).
2. IT Operations Password Reset & User Provisioning: Creating secure, auditable workflows for common IT requests, such as resetting user passwords across systems like Okta or managing access rights based on role changes, often reducing ticket resolution time by 50% or more.
3. Data Pipeline Orchestration: Connecting various data sources (databases, cloud storage, third-party analytics tools) to build reliable data transformation pipelines without requiring heavy engineering resources.
4. Compliance and Audit Trail Generation: Automatically collecting evidence, logging actions taken across systems during an incident, and generating comprehensive reports required for regulatory compliance checks.
5. Extending Automation to Non-Developers: Empowering analysts, HR staff, or business operations teams to build simple, effective automations for their specific needs, democratizing automation across the organization.

FAQ

Q: Is Tines primarily a SOAR platform? A: While Tines excels at security automation (SOAR capabilities), it is designed as a broader, intelligent workflow platform. It supports IT Operations, Infrastructure, and general business process automation, making it much more versatile than a traditional, security-only SOAR tool.

Q: How does Tines handle security and governance for sensitive workflows? A: Tines is built with security at its core, offering robust governance, granular access controls, and comprehensive monitoring across all workflows. All actions are logged, ensuring a clear audit trail, which is crucial when dealing with sensitive data or system changes.

Q: Can Tines integrate with custom or internal tools that don't have public APIs? A: Yes. Tines is highly vendor-agnostic. If a tool can be interacted with via webhooks, email, or even command-line interfaces (depending on deployment), Tines can typically be configured to connect and orchestrate actions with it.

Q: What is the learning curve like for new users? A: Tines is frequently praised for its ease of use and low time-to-effectiveness. The visual Storyboard builder makes it accessible for users who are not traditional developers, allowing them to build functional workflows quickly by focusing on the logic rather than complex syntax.

Q: Does Tines support the use of external Large Language Models (LLMs)? A: Absolutely. Tines is designed to be the secure integration layer for modern AI. It allows teams to securely connect and orchestrate workflows that utilize external LLMs, ensuring that data handling and context passing adhere to established security protocols.