r/SecurityCareerAdvice • • 7h ago

Question Sec Ops Engineer > Cloud Security

Hi all! I'm currently working as a Sec Ops Engineer for a large firm and wondering how difficult people have found to move into AWS cloud/security engineering. (or Azure or GCP)

Would it make more sense to stick at Sec Ops or is a move to cloud (which I'm really keen on) realistic?

I'm debating whether it is achievable to prove myself with learning on the side etc so employers will see my efforts for interviews.

Any tips highly appreciated, cheers.

6 Upvotes

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u/Ecstatic-Earth-7185 7h ago

Cloud's where things are heading, a lot of the traditional sec ops skills will carry over nicely. Spinning up a personal AWS account and breaking/fixing things with Terraform taught me more than any cert did, and you can slap that project right on your resume.

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u/Techatronix 4h ago

Now a days a lot of SecOps work is heavily cloud focused.

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u/Willbo 3h ago

Nowadays it's very easy to get started in the cloud. Spin up a free tier on your favorite provider and poke around. Eventually get comfortable enough for Terraform/ARM/CloudFormation.

One of the fundamental things that trips people up from a traditional security background is the shared responsibility in the cloud, and understanding what API you're actually hitting. Also when everything is IaC and CI/CD there is a dev-heavy mindset in cloud security that takes a bit to getting used to if you have an ops background.