Cloud-based Cyber Ranges Will Change the Future of Training and Certifying Security and DevOps Professionals
A half-decade ago, with much fanfare, cyber ranges were touted as a revolutionary pivot for cybersecurity professionals’ training. Many promises and investments were made, yet the revolution has been slow coming. What may have been a slow start appears to be picking up speed and, with the accelerated adoption of work-from-home business practices, may finally come of age.
The educational premise behind almost all cyber range training platforms is largely unchanged from decades-old war-gaming and capture the flag—nothing beats hands-on practice in refining attack and defense strategies or building responder muscle memory. Carefully scripted threat scenarios guide the training program—often gamifying the experience with mission scores and leaderboards. Many of the interfaces and scenario scene-setting often appear like they came from the imagination of developers who grew up on a diet of 1990’s video games like Command & Conquer; the militaristic adversary overtone is strong yet adds positively to the immersive experience for users.
For many years, gamified security training has required significant infrastructure investment by the provider—investments capable of replicating the complex environments of their customers and the apparatus to generate realistic network traffic. Like the customers that subscribe, cyber-range platforms are undergoing their own digital transformation and moving to the cloud—ephemeral virtual environments, dynamic scaling to the number of participants, global anytime delivery, etc., are all obvious advantages to building and running cyber ranges within the public cloud.
What may be less obvious is how cloud-based cyber ranges will change the future of training and certifying security and DevOps professionals.
Some of the changes underway (and maybe a couple years down the road for mainstream availability) that excite me include:
• At-home cyber-range training and hands-on mastery of operational security tasks and roles. Past cyber-range infrastructure investments necessitated classroom-based training or regional traveling roadshows. Cloud-based cyber ranges can remove the physical classroom and scheduling constraints—offering greater flexibility for employees to advance practical skills at their own pace and balance time investments against other professional and personal commitments. I’m particularly encouraged with the prospect of delivering a level field for growing and assessing the practical skills and operational experiences of security professionals coming from more diverse backgrounds.
• Train against destructive scenarios within your own business environment. As businesses run more of their critical systems within the cloud, it becomes much easier to temporarily spin up a clone, mirror, or duplicate of that environment and use it as the basis for potentially destructive training scenarios. Cyber ranges that apply threat scenarios and gamify the training regime for users across the replicated workloads of their customers significantly increase the learning value and response applicability to the business.
• Shift-left for security mastery within DevOps. Cyber range environments and the scenarios they originally embraced focused on security incident responders and SOC operators—the traditional Blue Team members. With security becoming a distributed responsibility, there is a clear need to advance from security awareness to hands-on experience and confidence for a broader range of cyberprofessional. Just as SIEM operations have been a staple of cyber ranges, a new generation of cyber-range platforms will “shift left” to replicate the complex CI/CD environments of their customers—enabling DevOps teams to practice responding to zero-day bugs in their own code and cascading service interruptions, for example.
It will be interesting to see how enterprise SOC leaders will embrace SecOps teams that trained and certified via cyber ranges at home. I’m sure many CISOs will miss the ability to escort senior executives, investors, and business partners around a room filled with security professionals diligently staring at screens of graphs and logs, and a wall of door-sized screens showing global pew-pew animated traffic flows.
There is a difference between a knowledge certificate and the confidence that comes with hands-on experience—and that confidence applies not only to the employee, but to their chain of command.
The coming of age for cyber ranges is both important and impactful. It is important that we can arm a greater proportion and more diverse range of cyberprofessionals with the hands-on practical experience to tackle real business threats. It is impactful because cyber-range scenarios provide real insights into an organization’s capabilities and resilience against threats, along with the confidence to tackle them when they occur.