@scottalanmiller said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

Yes I think you can put a $$ number on certifications. Some definitely mean guaranteed value.

None guarantee value. There is no cert that has a guaranteed ROI for everyone, absolutely none. Some are more likely than others, some have almost no value ever, some are almost always a loss. But you definitely can't say that they all have value, there is always someone high enough in any field that even the top cert, even every cert that there is, combined won't raise their salary one penny or open a single greater door. But every cert, every single one, has costs that need to be offset by something. Cost in money and cost in time.

Even the absolute best certs out there carry a reasonable amount of career risk. Maybe not a ton, and it feels good to earn the cert, but there is still a solid potential to actually lose money. Not that money is the only factor, hence why I said to put a dollar sign on the personal satisfaction to having the paper.

It's funny, one of the coolest certs I have gotten has zero marketability value, but taught me quite a bit. ECSA was fun, but nobody has heard of it.

If you have a popular non tech cert like CISSP you are instantly insanely more valuable. CISSP probably increased my value more than any other certification, but it was not technical nor fun.

Then you have certifications like Azure which is nearly all practical (like my ECSA was) and you build out an environment in a virtual lab. Then microsoft grades your lab at the end. Obviously a test like that proves you have competency.

Finally, you have some gimme certs that require very little studying, but provide high value in employment searches like AWS CCP or CSSK. Both highly sought after, but fairly little effort to obtain. CCSK was definitely a good one even though it was not alot of material and I respect it.

@scottalanmiller what's an established level to you? Is it based on experience and/or salary?

@scottalanmiller said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

If you spend $2k over let's say 5 certs, it will surely get you more than $2k return income on a yearly (repeating basis).

This is where I don't agree. On average I'd estimate that you'd lose money doing this versus either just investing the money (worst case) and/or using the money and time to focus on your career rather than a cert which is at best a proxy to your career.

It sounds obviously, $2K of certs will pay for themselves. But for the average person, this doesn't actually happen once they are past the entry level. Yes, when you are still getting your foot in the door this is going to be true almost always. But once you are established in your field, certs are really only going to be widely helpful in moving to an adjacent field.

Remember that there is a cost of lost opportunity in getting certs. They take time and money. And while they are unlikely to result in truly zero benefit, there is a lot of lost benefits that you can't measure and that people normally forget about.

That is opposite what I have seen and this may because I am working in newer specialized fields such Security and Cloud but certs are damn near required for almost any Engineering / Architect position.

@scottalanmiller said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

Why go through all the effort and get nothing tangible to show for it. It's a huge mistake IMO.

Because effort to knowledge. Often the cert has zero value for someone, but costs a lot of money. Why spend money if there is no return on it (no ROI?)

Just to have the paper for yourself? Okay, but put a dollar sign on that.

Yes I think you can put a $$ number on certifications. Some definitely mean guaranteed value.

@scottalanmiller said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

@IRJ said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

Most people you give advice to are on the junior level or mid level and are making under $150k a year.

true, but my goal is to show them how to break out of that. Often the ideas that get tossed around are based on the thinking that that's the cap and that that is all that there is. Often I would suspect that they are stuck there because of mindsets such as thinking that certs are the answer to show value, but once you are into that range, that really isn't the case much anymore.

I'm not espousing avoiding certs. My point all along is that the idea that certs are worth so much later in your career isn't really true on any scale.

I can see what you are saying about once you have 15-20 years experience it doesnt matter and I agree with that. I will hit 15 years in another year, but it definitely helped me in my first 14 years.

I have talked about this with people before, the less experience you have the harder it is to stick out and having competencies in multiple areas is important and gives you an advantage to getting into the interview.

@scottalanmiller said in Why IT certifications are worth more than you think...:

I regularly recommend doing all of the learning for a cert but not bothering to get the cert itself.

Why go through all the effort and get nothing tangible to show for it. It's a huge mistake IMO.

Most people you give advice to are on the junior level or mid level and are making under $150k a year. As @Dashrender mentioned if nothing else its a great way to pass HR filters and get your foot into a phone interview. Then thats where you show your actual experience.

You can tell when someone cheats getting certs within a few minutes of asking them questions, so of course its got no value for those people. When you are certified in a bunch of different areas and can talk like a SME on those areas it does show you are knowledgeable and practical.

If you spend $2k over let's say 5 certs, it will surely get you more than $2k return income on a yearly (repeating basis).

@stacksofplates said in When should I use a Bastion Host?:

@wrx7m said in When should I use a Bastion Host?:

@stacksofplates said in When should I use a Bastion Host?:

The whitelisting is probably a lot easier with Okta. But if you set up your SSH config for your profile you can use the bastion host automatically so it's probably 6 and half dozen.

Is this with Okta Advanced Server Access?

I'm not sure exactly what @IRJ is using. I just know he uses Okta. But with any zero trust whitelisting is easier because it isn't necessarily IP based.

I am not looking for a solution with this post, I just wanted to discuss in what situations do you use a bastion? Do you use if a different bastion for different environments or do you just do a single bastion and more granular control permissions with group permissions.

@DustinB3403 said in Wazuh - operational and can add agents - now what:

@IRJ said in Wazuh - operational and can add agents - now what:

So you already filtered it. Just click discover on top right

Doh that is so easy that I didn't even think that was it.

@DustinB3403

@DustinB3403 said in Wazuh - operational and can add agents - now what:

Or I guess an even better question is there some free training on wazuh? I did a very brief search and found a few things, but it's all over the place as to what may be useful.

Nope, I should make a course on Udemy, though

@DustinB3403 said in Wazuh - operational and can add agents - now what:

@IRJ so a lot of this works out of the box, one question I have is how the heck do I get the details of specific events.

In the below I specifically failed a login attempt a few times, How can I find out what client was attempting to login to this server and failed?

So you already filtered it. Just click discover on top right