Transitioning from DBA to security?

yzT

Long story short, my former employer offered me a DBA position, position that I have no experience in but I'm going to be trained. It entails a HUGE responsibility.

However, the databases realm is not of my interest, at least not from the point of view of administration.

So the point is, how could I leverage this opportunity to later move onto a security position (forensics, threat analyst, auditor)?

lsud00d

You should get really good at generating reports which parlays into auditing.

Aside from that and database security/hardening...I'm not sure how much would be transferable.

docrice

While having DBA knowledge is very helpful in some areas of security, it seems to me that managing databases on a daily basis is highly focused on just that aspect and I suspect you might lose peripheral sight of other areas critical to security in general. Not saying that being a DBA isn't useful, but as it stands now I'd guess you might go into a role and find yourself stuck in it if you ultimately want to get into security.

I personally find database work (with my little real exposure to it) very tedious and boring. I'm sure others look at what I do and think the same thing though. I find databases so uninteresting that I'd consider doing normal IT work rather than working on databases (although DBA salaries tend to be high from what I've seen).

yzT

well, I declined the DBA offer but they counter-offered with my old security engineer / sysadmin position, so I got a job again.