Twilio's Prima Virani on democratizing security and tackling burnout through automation

This week on The Future of Security Operations podcast, Thomas is joined by Prima Virani. Prima is a security engineer who worked across industries as varied as oil and gas and Fintech before becoming Principal Security Engineer at Twilio. With over a decade of experience spanning infrastructure security engineering, incident detection and response, and forensics, she's also shared insights at countless security conferences around the world, including SecTOR Canada and Agile India.

In this episode, Prima and Thomas discuss:

- The unique challenges of working in forensics

- Her transition to detection and response and cloud security

- Building a security detection framework at Segment

- Reducing mean time to resolve through automation

- Using data to prioritize which processes should be automated

- Merging teams and technologies when Segment was acquired by Twilio

- Joining the securing platform engineering team at Twilio

- Designing a challenging and varied career in security

- The influence of mentorship on career growth

- Democratizing security through knowledge sharing

- How security will change in the next five years

The Future of Security Operations is brought to you by Tines, the smart, secure workflow builder that powers some of the world’s most important workflows. https://www.tines.com/solutions/security

Where to find Prima Virani: 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/secnerdette?lang=en

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/primavirani/

Twilio: https://www.twilio.com/en-us

Where to find Thomas Kinsella: 

Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/thomasksec

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thomas-kinsella/

Resources mentioned:

Hosting Fleet on AWS EKS by Prima Virani: https://segment.com/blog/hosting-fleetdm-on-aws-eks/

Fleet Device Management: https://fleetdm.com/

In this episode:

[02:22] Prima's introduction to cybersecurity career opportunities as a teenager

[06:30] The shift from forensics to detection and response

[09:15] Gaining experience in vulnerability and patch management, and network security

[14:15] Building a security detection framework at Segment using SOCless

[18:10] Using automation to reduce alert noise and improve response times

[20:30] The impact of automation on security team burnout

[22:50] Merging security teams, practices and technologies during Twilio's acquisition of Segment

[25:30] Moving to the securing platform engineering team at Twilio

[27:40] Growing her knowledge of AWS, Kubernetes and GCP

[32:40] Prima's plans to embrace machine learning in detection engineering

[34:20] The importance of mentorship and knowledge sharing in career growth

[37:30] Prima's all-time favorite projects, including hosting FleetDM on AWS EKS

[39:36] The future of security operations through Prima's eyes

[42:01] Prima's advice for security practitioners

[43:58] Connect with Prima