Translations: "Spanish" |

Why every security professional needs to embrace DevOps and automation

If you are a cybersecurity professional, or you plan to become one, at some point, you had or have to deal with building an infrastructure for research, learning, or test something as part of your daily job.

About 20 years ago, I found a text written by Eric Raymond called "How to become a hacker," and the section that I would like to highlight is the attitude:

• World is full of problems waiting to be solved.
• No problem should ever have to be solved twice.
• Boredom and drudgery are evil.
• Freedom is good.
• Attitude is no substitute for competence.

I have to admit that those lines shaped my way of thinking since then. And now, in 2020, I found that the whole text is not only still relevant, but that has also been kept updated as the first version was published back in 1996. If you never read it or heard about it, I invite you to do so.

From that list, I would like to highlight this line: "No problem should ever have to be solved twice." And this is something where DevOps and automation tools help us, to create and improve our workflow and become more agile in our daily tasks and investigations.

DevOps and automation have become mandatory in every IT environment, and even more with cloud adoption and digital transformation initiatives. From a cybersecurity perspective, it also has its challenges; that's why it is crucial to understand the concepts, risks, and threats.

It is up to us to take advantage of those tools and use them to reduce the amount of time we spent doing repetitive tasks, and focus on keeping the pace of the research we need to do to stay current in this highly dynamic and always changing cybersecurity landscape.