Cybersecurity continues to be a critical concern for individuals, organizations, and governments worldwide. However, the increasing reliance on technology has also resulted in a growing demand for skilled cybersecurity professionals to secure these systems and data. This demand has helped to identify numerous “opportunities” for automation to play a significant role in helping to enable and upskill the cybersecurity workforce. This presentation will cover several of these “opportunities.”

Ansible is critical infrastructure for your enterprise. It can automate your security posture for devices ranging from firewalls and switches to application servers and databases, or be the glue that ties threat modeling and compliance auditing to your SIEM and SOAR systems. Because it can play such a central role -- we must protect it as well or it becomes an easy and valuable target. We'll discuss best practices and new guidance from Red Hat for protecting your Ansible Automation Platform (AAP) in the form of a recently released Ansible controller DISA Secure Technical Implementation Guide and a new Red Hat security guide. From there, other ways to think about how you can protect your enterprise control plane.

Security encompasses a variety of products and services designed to protect organizations from the loss or damage to their data, applications, IT systems, networks, and devices from malicious or unintended activities. Ansible solves many of these security challenges not by replacing those tools, but by integrating and augmenting them for investigation enrichment, better threat hunting, and faster incident response. Security is too important not to automate.

Many organizations struggle to configure and manage their firewalls using CLI or GUI tools. With the advent of Zero Trust Security, firewalls have grown in number and complexity. These devices must deliver dynamic segmentation across modern on-premise and cloud networks. This session will explain the Palo Alto Networks Certififed Collection for Ansible and discuss many firewall use cases mapped to the benefits of automation. Also, we will demonstrate a Palo Alto Networks firewall in the AWS cloud using Ansible automation to manage rule onboarding and decommissioning, object modification, policy compliance, and simplifying connectivity to applications throughout the network.

We bring it all together in this session, with a demo showing Ansible security automation across multiple platforms and vendors. Splunk, PAN firewalls, and other tools will be highlighted in this demonstration.

The term “patching” dates back to the days of punch cards when a programmer would literally patch a hole in a punch card to correct a bug. Unfortunately, many of our “modern” patching procedures resemble that of the past rather than the future. With known vulnerabilities ranking as a leading attack vector, the time has come to modernize the way we patch our software for our sanity and the security of our critical infrastructure. In this session, we will cover the benefits of automating your patch process, tips for developing your patch automation strategy, and how the Ansible Automation Platform executes your strategy.