Why use AWS and Terraform

The demand for cybersecurity professionals who can safeguard sensitive data and infrastructure is rising. To effectively meet this demand, cybersecurity professionals must possess different technical skills. One of the most effective ways to provide these technical skills is through hands-on lab exercises and a training environment to practice. These environments can range from simple to complex, depending on the needs of the hands-on lab exercise being taught.

The combination of hands-on lab exercises and a training environment provides cybersecurity professionals the opportunity to improve existing skills and learn new ones. However, this opportunity comes with challenges. Creating and maintaining these training environments can be costly, resource-intensive, and pose logistical issues. The cost to acquire, set up, store, and maintain servers, network equipment, and workstations can be substantial. Additional cost concerns include procuring a training environment and the associated power, heating, and cooling requirements. Software purchase and licensing are additional costs that must be addressed. Finally, the scalability of the environment to accommodate large training groups can pose a substantial challenge.

To address the challenges and costs outlined above, training providers are turning to cloud computing services as a more cost-effective solution. Cloud computing services allow training providers to scale environments with relative ease. The use of cloud computing services also enables training providers to provision and destroy virtual environments on-demand, thus removing the need to keep physical hardware on hand and the need to purchase new hardware. Instead of making these potentially expensive capital expenditures, cloud computing allows clients to use a pay-as-you-go basis. Because cloud computing services reside on the Internet, they are accessible from anywhere, thus enabling training providers to make their training environment available to anyone with an Internet connection. This near-ubiquitous availability reduces travel costs for trainees and removes the requirement for the training provider to have a physical location to deliver training. Cloud providers are also responsible for handling the maintenance and updating of their products, thus removing that burden from training providers. Cloud providers also offer transparent pricing models, allowing organizations to predict and control their training costs more effectively.

Automating cloud-based services via tools like Terraform has proven to be a valuable approach when delivering cloud-based training. Using Terraform to automate environment definition and creation is both time-saving and error-reducing. It allows training providers to ensure that the desired environment is created to their specifications, with little chance of error or misconfiguration. Terraform also enables training providers to present real-world threats in a simulated environment, thus allowing for more realistic training opportunities in a safe environment.