Automated Security Pipelines for Zero-Budget Teams

When you're the only IT person at your company, manual security checks don't scale — you simply don't have the hours. This talk is a practical, hands-on walkthrough of building automated security pipelines using free and open-source tools, without an enterprise budget or a dedicated security team.

I'll cover the actual automation stack I use to handle patching alerts, endpoint monitoring, log review, and basic security hygiene checks — turning what used to be manual, easily-forgotten tasks into scheduled, hands-off processes. I'll walk through real examples: what gets automated first, which free-tier tools genuinely hold up in production versus which ones fall apart at scale, and how these pieces connect into a lightweight pipeline instead of a pile of disconnected scripts.

I'll also be honest about the failure modes — "automation theater," where pipelines look impressive but nobody maintains them, alerts that get ignored because there are too many, and the point where automation stops being a solution and starts being its own maintenance burden.

Attendees will leave with a concrete, ordered starting point for automating security operations solo: what to automate first, what tools are actually worth the setup time, and how to keep a pipeline alive long after the initial excitement wears off.