By Bill Mann
With a greater focus on security from both IT decision-makers and developers, there’s an opportunity for more collaboration between the two groups. And CISOs can play an important role in facilitating that by building greater trust. Here are three steps CISOs can take today:
1. Start a dialogue. Do your own alignment survey to get a pulse on how your teams are currently working together. After you find out where the gaps are, have workshops with engineering to help understand the challenges. Stress the importance of security and identify a solution that works for both teams. Cloud-native adoption is increasing because of the mobility, agility and flexibility that modern containerized apps provide, so the last thing you want to do is hinder productivity.
2. Embrace DevSecOps. Security controls must be integrated into the DevOps pipeline, so invite security experts to join you during the design phase of applications. I suggest hiring or appointing a DevSecOps leader in your organization, and if you want to learn more about the importance of DevSecOps, I’ve written about it in a previous Forbes Tech Council article.
3. Invest in the right tooling. To ensure that everyone is aligned, you’ll need to invest in the right tooling. A great place to look is the open-source community. Open source is maturing and becoming better-supported with increasingly large user communities. There’s no better place to find best practices or a wealth of knowledge around cloud-native tools.
CISOs can be the leaders that help organizations adopt new technologies to meet growing customer demand while ensuring that compliance standards are met. By reaching out to their counterparts in engineering and helping bridge the gap between the two departments, CISOs help build trust throughout the organization.
- Mann is the CEO of Styra, Inc., the founders of Open Policy Agent (OPA) and leaders in cloud-native authorization.
