I was looking at my garage today and it really reminded me of tech debt. The garage was functional, but not efficient. There were things everywhere and lots of space unused or not optimized. I neglected and avoiding cleaning things up, so when I wanted to, it was overwhelming. Cleaning the garage was time out my day I didn’t want to spend, but I know it would make future projects easier.

Technical debt increases complexity and is sometimes a blocker towards security. How? Well, for example say I want to take advantage of a new security/fraud feature that my payment processor offers… but I’m 2 whole versions behind… then I’m limited in implementing this feature. Sure, there can be workarounds, but that’s not the point. This happened before in real life.

The more complex a system is, the probability of increasing risk to the system goes up. This is also includes information security risk.

Many times I want to implement some of my security tooling, but I see a lot of fundamental processes are manual, which limits my ability for deploying tooling efficiently.

One example is say you want to add checkov into your Terraform CI/CD pipelines, but turns out you don’t even CI/CD setup on repos!

Anyway, next time you look at your garage, or your tech stack, consider picking up a box or converting that instance into a container. Your future you might thank you. This is advice to me as well!

Take care,

Ayman