#TOOLS
Yesterday I talked about Patching, today Tools.
How I see IT people’s relationships with them – both successful and not.
I spent most of my career with no tools but what was free or I built. Now I have a budget overflowing with them. I’ve been able to compare and contrast. https://twitter.com/swiftonsecurity/status/1280687714287976448

Tools are almost always higher-level abstractions of abilities you’re already have and can learn for free. They can make things easier to do, easier to delegate, and more automated.
But they are not in themselves a good thing. They introduce uniqueness and complexity and failure.

As a junior IT person in some small business you will see advertisements and demos and talk of the privileged about all the tools they have.
That you don’t. And you will draw the wrong conclusion. That you need them to be accepted or without them you cannot succeed. This is false

Tools can also dull your skills. When everything you experience about a system is filtered through a disparate set of other people’s interpretations, you cannot connect underlying dots and behaviors you would readily observe if forced to do so directly using the native toolset.

The greatest practitioners in IT will often use tools extensively, but for higher-level purposes they know they don’t need to concern themselves with. They are still experts interfacing with the underlying systems directly - augmenting their tools not just building on top of them

What tools offer you is arbitrage.
There is one tool that my company licenses for $40,000 a year. I can do everything it can do for free trivially.
But it is accessible, automated, support is fantastic, others can use it when I am gone, and I have better things to spend time on.

Tools are rarely privileged capabilities.
Not having them does not make you lesser.
Seeing the world through a vendor’s lens is built to make a sale.
So much of what is sold is GUI on top of another command. I know. I’ve written the commands.
That’s okay. It’s an abstraction.