NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) is a federal agency under the responsibility of the US Department of Commerce. Established in 1901 to promote innovation and industrial competitiveness in the US, NIST helps organizations advance measurement science, technology, and standards to improve the quality of life for citizens and enhance economic security.
$132.94 billion. That’s the size of the cybersecurity market today. But despite the massive investment in money, time, and expertise, organizations have never been more at risk of an attack. What’s causing the disconnect? Despite all the effort to ensure security, there is an equally massive and growing effort to exploit vulnerable organizations.
When it comes to security teams, many people may assume that these specialists have some natural ability or extra mental strength for dealing with challenges. After all, these individuals are responsible for preventing cyberattacks and dealing with catastrophic incidents when they occur; they must always be on and ready.
As a developer, you’re probably using some infrastructure cloud provider. And chances are, you automate parts of your infrastructure using infrastructure as code (IaC), so deployments are repeatable, consistent, easily deployable, and overall, more secure because code makes parameters more visible.
Over the last few years, the rate of cyberattacks has continued to hit record growth, taking advantage of individuals or businesses with poor cybersecurity practices. These attacks have affected healthcare, government, finance, and major businesses around the world. Of these cyberattacks, ransomware consistently ranks at the top of the most common cyber threats list, with an estimated 623 million incidents worldwide in 2021.
Toil — endless, exhausting work that yields little value in DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) — is the scourge of security engineers everywhere. You end up with mountains of toil if you rely on manual effort to maintain cloud security. Your engineers spend a lot of time doing mundane jobs that don’t actually move the needle. Toil is detrimental to team morale because most technicians will become bored if they spend their days repeatedly solving the same problems.
Cybersecurity strategies within cloud environments are often seen as a complicated landscape with rapidly developing technologies, architectures, and terms. Simultaneously, there are continuously motivated individuals and groups trying to utilize vulnerabilities for illicit uses such as to increase access to the data, install malware, disrupt services, and more.
