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For CISOs To Scale Security Fast, Shift-Left Is Not Enough

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Digital transformation has reshaped countless businesses, through the combined forces of software explosion, cloud adoption, and DevOps re-education. This has enabled new entrants to disrupt industries (e.g., Airbnb), and non-software incumbents to position themselves as de-facto software companies (e.g., Bosch).

Yet, as many CISOs have found out during this time, more software equals more risk. As a result, as James Kaplan, McKinsey’s cybersecurity leader, has said, “for many companies cybersecurity is increasingly a critical business issue, not only or even primarily a technology issue.” Let’s look at how each of the major vectors of change has contributed to this dynamic new reality.

Breaking down digital transformation

First, as Mark Andreesen once predicted, software is eating the world; to make things even more dynamic, open source is eating software, and as a result of both, developers are increasingly influential when it comes to technology choices.

Second, cloud infrastructure has introduced huge amounts of new technology: consider as examples containers and serverless replacing servers and VMs, and infrastructure-as-code supplanting traditional datacenter operations and security. Many of these technologies are changing rapidly, and not all of them are mature—but since developers are more influential, CIOs often have no choice but to live with these risks in production.

Finally, the rise of DevOps methodologies has changed the process of how software is developed and delivered, and the ownership of it across the lifecycle. Examples of this include continuous integration and delivery, which has brought gates and delays to a minimum, and has created empowered and self-sufficient teams of developers. This means that these more opinionated and more influential teams can now move more freely than ever before.

Software-defined everything? This shift has clearly redefined the IT stack and its ownership model, as shown in the chart below.

Operations teams, through DevOps, typically aim for manageable ratios of 1 Operations per 15 Developers, or in many cases even lower. Where does this leave security teams and CISOs, who in my experience are often expected to deliver a 1:30 or 1:40 ratio? Unfortunately, with their backs to the wall.

Security is left behind

On the one hand, security teams are very much still in the critical path of much of software delivery; however, they are also often separate from development and uninformed, and using outdated tools and processes. As a result, many security professionals are perceived by developers as slowing down the ever-accelerating process of delivery, and by executives as contributing to the release of vulnerable applications. This presents them with an almost impossible conflict of speed vs. security, which speed typically wins.

To make things even worse, a severe talent shortage perpetuates the state of understaffed security teams. Cybersecurity professional organisation ISC claimed in a recent survey that the global IT Security shortage is four million, and while half of the sample is looking to change how they deliver security, hiring is slowing them down and putting the business at risk. Over half of those polled said that their organisation is at moderate-to-extreme risk due to staff shortage.

Not just shift left, but top to bottom

In a previous piece, I examined how containers are challenging existing models of security ownership, and asked, “How far to the right should shift-left go?”

Yet if our stack is increasingly software-defined, from the top almost to the bottom, then it should be up to developers to secure it top-down. On a recent episode of The Secure Developer podcast, Justin Somaini, a well known security industry leader with experience from the likes of Yahoo! and Verisign, stated that he expected a third to half of a security team’s headcount to move from today’s process management roles into security-minded developers roles.

This brave new world of Cloud Native Application Security means moving people to the left as well as tools, but also extending developer ownership of security as far as software reaches. This does not present a risk to security professionals’ jobs: it is a change in reporting lines, and an enhancement of their skills—a genuine career development opportunity. On the hiring front, this opens up the option to recruit into security-relevant functions not only security talent, but also programming talent. This shift in ownership and role definition will make everyone’s lives easier.

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