Ten Years of Securosis: Time for a Memory Dump

I started Securosis as a blog a little over 10 years ago. 9 years ago, it became my job. Soon after that Adrian Lane and Mike Rothman joined me as partners. Over that time we’ve published well over 10,000 posts, around 100 research papers, and given countless presentations. When I laid down that first post I was 35, childless, a Research VP at Gartner still, and recently married. In other words, I had a secure job, and the kind of free time no one with a kid ever sees again. Every morning I woke up energized to TELL THE INTERNET IMPORTANT THINGS!

In those 10 years I added three kids, my two partners, and grew what may be the only successful analyst firm to spin out of Gartner in decades. I finished my first triathlons, marathon, and century (plus) bike ride. I started programming again. We racked up a dream list of clients, presented at all the biggest events, and built a collection of research I’m truly proud of, especially my more-recent work on cloud and DevOps, including two training classes.

But it hasn’t all been rainbows and unicorns, especially the past couple of years. I stopped training in martial arts after nearly 20 years (kids), had two big health scares (totally fine), and slowly became encumbered with all the time-consuming overhead of being self employed. We went through 3 incredibly time consuming and emotional failed acquisitions where the offers didn’t meet our goals. We spent two years self funding, designing, and building a software platform that every iota of my experience and analysis says is desperately needed to manage security as we transition to cloud computing, but we couldn’t get it over the finish line. We weren’t willing to make the personal sacrifices you need to in order to get funding unless you are already wealthy, and we couldn’t find another path.

In other words, we lived life.

A side effect, especially after all the effort I put into Trinity (you can see a video of it here), is that I lost a lot of my time and motivation to write during a period where there is a hell of a lot to write about. We are in the midst of the most disruptive transition in how we build, operate, and manage technology. Around seven years ago I bet big on cloud (and then DevOps), with both research and hands-on work. Now there aren’t a lot of people out there with my experience, but I’ve done a crappy job of sharing it. In part I was holding back to give Trinity and our cloud engagements an edge. In bigger part because essentially (co) running two companies at the same time and seeing one of them not make it was emotionally crushing.

Why share all of this? Why not. I miss the days when I work up motivated to TELL THE INTERNET THOSE IMPORTANT THINGS. And the truth is, I no longer know what my future holds. Securosis is still extremely strong — we grew yet again this year and it was probably personally my biggest year yet. On the downside that growth is coming at a cost, where I spend most of my time traveling around performing cloud security assessments, building architectures, and running training classes. It’s very fulfilling work, but a bit of a step back in some ways. I don’t mind some travel, but most of my work now involves it and I don’t like spending that much time away from the family.

Did I mention I miss being motivated to write?

Over the next couple of months I’m going to brain dump everything I can, especially on cloud and DevOps. This isn’t for a paper. No one is licensing it, and I don’t have any motives other than to core dump everything I’ve learned over the past 7 years before I get bored and do something else. Clients have been asking me for a long time where to start in cloud security and I haven’t had anyplace to send them. So I’m putting up this page to collect all these posts in some relatively readable order. My intention is to follow the structure I use when assessing projects but odds are it will end up being a big hot mess. I’ll also be publishing most of the code and tools I’ve been building but was holding on to.

Yeah, this post is probably TMI, but we’ve always tried to be personal and honest around here. That is exactly what used to excite me so much I couldn’t wait to get out of bed and get to work. Perhaps those days are past. Or perhaps it’s just a matter of writing for the love of writing again instead of writing for projects, papers, or promotion.

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