In preparing for my Cloud Security World 2016 talk, "Automagic! Shifting Trust Paradigms Through Security Automation," I did a lot of thinking about what can be automated, how to automate, and how to demonstrate and measure value around all that jazz. It occurred to me. however, that perhaps I was looking at those questions all wrong. Is it really a question of whether or not something should be automated, so much as it's a question of what shouldn't be automated?
At first blush, this may seem like a silly way of thinking about things. After all, it's probably still too early to talk about automating, well, just about everything, right? As it turns out, this isn't the case. Not even close. There are so many ways to automate many of our standard development, operational, and security responsibilities that I'm actually surprised we're still hearing complaints about inadequate hirable resources and not instead hearing complaints about too much automation stealing jobs.
That said, there are certainly several areas where automation requires human involvement, either as a fail-safe, or as a manual process. Here are a few of those categories and a little information on why fully automating is at least premature, if not an outright bad idea.
