That One Time I Was a One-Person Cybersecurity Department

I saw this post from Kaaviya Balaji saying:

“If you’re looking for someone who knows SIEM, SOAR, EDR, XDR, IAM, MFA, SSO, Cloud (AWS, Azure, GCP), Firewalls, Compliance (ISO, NIST, GDPR, PCI-DSS), Incident Response, Threat Intel, and more…
That’s not a Cybersecurity Analyst.
That’s an entire Cybersecurity Department.”

And I laughed — because, yeah, that was me.

For a long time, I was the cybersecurity department.
With Arctic Wolf Networks as my MDR/SOC backbone, I built and operated everything else — from Azure IAM and Palo Alto firewalls to endpoint protection, Zero Trust segmentation, and internal compliance frameworks mapped to ISO 27002 and NIST CSF.

Some days it felt like I was fighting fires.
Other days, like I was building the fire station.

Either way, the experience taught me something:
👉 Cybersecurity isn’t just tools and controls — it’s culture, discipline, and resilience.

Here’s to all the one-person departments out there holding the line. 🔐💪