Security in Sync: How Security Teams Can Make Cloud Remediation Less Painful for Engineers

Meny Har, Co-Founder & CEO

October 19, 2023

The responsibility for remediating risks has become as distributed as the nature of the cloud enterprises increasingly rely on. And while the cloud has enabled organizations to innovate and achieve more than ever before, it has also generated many new and dispersed points of risk. Today, security teams need to work with numerous engineering groups to achieve their ideal security posture. As engineers take on bigger security roles, CISOs also find themselves in a new role as well: Risk Orchestrators.

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Source: “Gartner Says the Cybersecurity Leader’s Role Needs to Be Reframed”, Feb, 22’

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As the owners of the security posture of the organization, CISOs have always been responsible for coordinating as well as executing on the security measures required to protect the organization. However, their role is quickly shifting from a centralized security owner to security orchestrator–one that’s highly distributed to match the increasingly distributed nature of modern enterprise technology.

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Today's security teams are managing an ever-changing security posture consisting of both cloud-native applications and infrastructure, mostly built by engineering and/or DevOps teams. This makes it a necessity for those teams to closely partner with engineers to ensure that security measures are implemented effectively and efficiently, and that any potential security risks are quickly identified and remediated.

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This involves creating an effective day-to-day relationship built on trust and providing engineers with clear policies (and reasoning), a coherent view of their security risks, and actionable solutions when available. However, this is a tremendous task to orchestrate manually when dealing with a large number of security findings, processes, teams, and jargons, and tends to cause a growing friction between the teams. For security to remain effective in this new, cloud-native environment, organizations have to get this relationship right.

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Engineers, often short on time, aren’t always ready to buy in.

It’s simple, engineers want to execute and security wants to fix. Though every team in a company is expected to dedicate itself to business enablement, security and engineering departments have very different mindsets about their responsibilities for accomplishing this. These different mindsets lie at the heart of the friction that often exists between the two departments, complicating collaboration and remediation efforts.

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To engineers, addressing security issues is a never ending endeavor. In most of their experience, security tasks continuously flow from numerous tools, many of which end up being false positives and usually lack any real context for them to understand them. Many are often left unable to determine what to fix out of a massive pool of options, how to fix what’s needed, or where the fixes are required. To engage engineers in modern security processes, security teams must address all of this.

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Collaboration is possible, though!

We need a way to effectively–and efficiently–bridge engineering and security teams without impacting the efficacy of either. Security and engineering teams can expect, and must therefore plan for a future where they work together to effectively reduce risk on a day-to-day basis. We can start by at least having them speak the same language.

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This is where security orchestration can make a tremendous impact. Security orchestration solutions can help streamline and simplify the remediation process, allowing security teams to focus on more meaningful initiatives, make informed decisions based on prioritized and contextualized data and communicate effectively to engineers. By adopting automated security orchestration and remediation solutions, security teams can help effectively remediate potential risks without sacrificing productivity or operational efficiency–engineering’s biggest priorities. Very importantly, Orchestration can provide a much-needed bridge to help bring these two departments together.

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So how can security teams sync up security with engineering?

Prioritizing all incoming information

First, everyone involved needs a way to verify the priority and validity of incoming security tasks. This is one of the most important means by which to promote efficiency and ensure that engineers know they are working on pressing tasks.

Providing key context

Next, engineering teams require proper awareness of risk, including potential impact, organizational (or technical) context and, most importantly, recommendations for the best possible way to fix identified issues. Naturally, the latter must be communicated in a way that can be easily understood and quickly implemented–using tools they are already familiar with. For maximal results, this should be as automatically provided as possible.

Sharing a single source of truth with maximal visibility

The only way to collaborate is if the teams involved share a unified view of ongoing operations. Centralized visibility across all layers of security can help leadership teams see and use metrics to track the progress of remediation efforts. This would enable security to consciously evaluate the risks, apply the right controls and deliver validated, actionable security risks to engineers. On the flip side, such visibility for engineers would help them trust, understand and efficiently remediate what’s required.

At Opus, we figured that most of these orchestrating tasks can be automated. Now we have a whole platform dedicated to security orchestration and remediation.

Creating connective tissue between your organization's departments and infrastructures

By embracing today’s new shared responsibility model and bridging the inherent gaps between security and engineering, organizations can significantly improve their security posture on a continual basis while creating a true collaborative environment and maximizing any potential impact of remediation efforts. And, with the right tools, security and engineering can work together to drive best practice remediation together, across both cloud and code, without compromising security and business.

The Opus platform integrates across the organization’s many posture management solutions and traces each finding to its root cause while automatically assessing its organizational context. Not only does this accelerate the remediation process, it does so with significantly less resources. In this way, the Opus Platform helps security teams identify and orchestrate remediation across their organizations, with all necessary departments–especially engineering or devops teams. By helping orchestrate all of the teams, tasks and tools involved, Opus significantly reduces the time and effort required by security teams to effectively reduce risk

Learn more about how we help security teams and engineers work in sync here