When I’m asked what skills are important for the future IT professional, DevOps aka making things work with things is always in my top 5. The reason is simple. There is no way modern security operation centers can manually keep up with what is needed to reduce the risk of cyber threats. Automation is a requirement for higher maturity cyber services such as incident response, vulnerability management and threat monitoring. Analyst can’t manually look at every event. They can’t manually take actions against hundreds to thousands of alerts. Its just impossible to do this as the amount of data increases that must be considered and number of events that can occur all at once.
In order to keep up with the speed of data and needed actions, automation and orchestration is required leading to a drive towards DevOps. DevOps is a form of programming that allows things to work with things. For example, when a security detection tool determines a system is impacted by a threat, it can alert a network access control tool to automatically take action allowing the security operation center time to further investigate the situation while the threat has been removed from the network.
DevOps is a open concept meaning it is vendor agnostic and something you need to ask vendors about supporting as you consider investing in technology. DevOps is different from integration. Many vendor tools integrate with tools from the same vendor but they do not work with other vendor tools due to a lack of support of key ingredients for DevOps to work such as open APIs.
Cisco is hosting a conference this week focused on DevOps called DevNet Create. Register at https://mkto.cisco.com/devnet-create-2021.html?utm_source=email&utm_medium=awareness&ut
Also check out https://developer.cisco.com/ for on demand free DevOps training and labs. If you want to be relevant in today as well as tomorrow’s security operation center, you will need to understand DevOps.
I highly recommended to add DevOps to your future learning objectives. There will be a point you can’t pedal faster and will need automation in your life.
