When the 2017 Equifax breach was investigated, congressional and federal auditors traced part of the failure to a routine gap nobody had automated: a network device responsible for inspecting encrypted traffic had been running on a security certificate that had lapsed, and the lapse went unnoticed while attackers were …

Every small IT team has been there: someone stands up a virtual machine by clicking through the cloud console, then two weeks later a colleague needs a second identical one and has to remember — or guess — every setting that was chosen the first time. A firewall rule gets missed. The region is different. The instance …