top of page
  • Phil Venables

Coding Skills and Security

I've increasingly found, with respect to coding, security has come full circle. Those of us who started in the 80's/90's had to code (or stitch together) stuff because for most of what you needed to do you couldn't buy it or download it. This was everything from firewalls, crypto, authentication, authorization, logging, rudimentary IDS, even in some cases some pretty neat home grown malware defenses. Pretty much all you could buy initially was access control, host security (crypto) modules and anti-virus.

Now, coding skills are needed again to partner more closely with development teams, to stitch together tools, configure systems ("policy as code"), and adapt or contribute to the myriad of fine open source projects. This shouldn't diminish the huge diversity of roles and skills that need to exist in the modern risk team [cyber or not]: risk analysis, analytics, modeling, design, communication, education and sales. Yes, those also need some coding expertise but not core to the role.

Bottom line : IMHO coding skills / experience are important, and we've definitely come full circle for security engineers - but in the past decades the field has diversified such that even more skills / roles beyond coding are also needed.

768 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

Since the last post about leverage points in managing complex systems I thought it would be good to revisit and update a post from a few years ago looking at the seemingly accepted wisdom that complex

Security is an emergent property of the complex systems we inhabit. In other words, security isn’t a thing that you do, rather it's a property that emerges from a set of activities and sustained condi

Unless you’re doing continuous or quarterly budgeting, which some organizations do, then you’ll no doubt be getting ready for the long haul of the annual budget process to seek the resources you need

bottom of page