Okay, I’m just throwing this one out there because the research is far from complete but I really want to hear what other people think.

As I spend more time flying around meeting with security professionals and talking about the cloud, I find that security teams are generally far less engaged with cloud and virtualization projects than I thought. It seems that large swaths of essential enterprise security are almost fully managed by the cloud and virtualization teams, with security often in more of a blind role – if not outright excluded.

I’m not saying security professionals are willfully ignorant or anything, but that, for a variety of reasons, they aren’t engaged and often lack important experience with the technology that’s required to even develop appropriate policies – never mind help with implementation.

To be honest, it isn’t like most security professionals don’t already have full plates, but I do worry that our workforce may lose relevance if it fails to stay up to date on the ongoing technology shifts enabled by virtualization and the cloud. The less involved we are with the growing reliance on these technologies, the less relevant we are to the organization. I already see a ton of security being implemented by DevOps types who, while experts in their fields, often miss some security essentials because security isn’t their primary role.

Not that security has to do everything – that model is long dead. But I fear lack of experience with virtualization and the cloud, and of understanding how fundamentally different those operating models are, could very negatively affect our profession’s ability to accomplish our mission.

Share: