This Is What Your Security Champions Program Is Missing

Roee Shohat, Head of Go to Market

May 9, 2024

5 min read

Security teams become increasingly out-of-breath as malicious actors find more sophisticated ways to breach, penetrate, and attack. Security practitioners are often asked how they’re doing professionally - “we’re drowning, help!”.

Security leaders struggle to scale their efforts without increasing their headcount in the face of budget and HR constraints across the global market. Most CISOs will say that a strong Security Champions program is the single thing they can do to drive growth without increasing their budget.

With little time and resources to ensure its effectiveness, Opus can assist security leaders in setting up their first Security Champions program or improving an existing one for optimal results. With focused guidance and training rolled out efficiently with measurement and metrics, Opus’ platform will ensure maximum value from your existing program, increasing collaboration and cross-organizational workflows, and ensuring proper implementation.

Here is an excellent and one of the most comprehensive guides I've found on how to set up a security champion program: http://securitychampionsuccessguide.org/ by Dustin Lehr.

‍

Communication and Collaboration

Efficient communication and seamless collaboration with your champions are crucial for a successful program. Keep in mind that you include the mode and method, cadence and criteria regarding what issues should be communicated, what the anticipated SLA is, how it will be measured (by ticket-creation time, identification, etc.) and more.

With Opus, these processes are done in minutes. To define the types of issues, specific levels of severity, and business context, all that needs to be done is to select from a drop-down list. Save the rule, and your Security Champion will be updated in the manner they choose—email, ticket, direct message, or even team channel—regarding an individual finding, a report on a specific application, or the recent phenomenal progress they’ve made.

Facilitate Training for Champions and Developers

Opus' Unified Cloud-Native Remediation platform provides unprecedented visibility across the organization, helping security teams quickly identify and pinpoint the most pressing security issues. These findings can then serve as the basis for training and educating security champions with real, relevant threats, bringing true value to the organization as a whole. For example, if the security team ran training with champions on code injections and wanted to understand if they mistakenly didn’t sanitize inputs, Opus’ platform allows you to filter out all of the findings with the relevant topic of injections, and create a campaign. Such training sessions will allow security teams to track remediation progress, gamify it with challenging teams and champions and make it an exciting competition that also helps the organization. Opus can also propose campaigns that will have the most impact and improve your next training sessions.

Security Champions Program Rollout

When it comes to rolling out the program, it’s important to target the appropriate stakeholders, align with management, and ensure that the plan gets the right amount of attention to guarantee buy-in. Opus facilitates communication with these stakeholders by structuring your company and the applications and services associated with each team, enabling you to target the right stakeholder easily with post-rollout feedback and progress measurement. Using a streamlined process, invite the stakeholders to the platform, assign them the relevant structure/application, and choose the appropriate mode of communication. From that point forward, Opus will take the lead with ticket creation, tracking, notification of SLA expiration, and progress updates for managers.

Tuning and Measurement

Opus’ platform ensures the most comprehensive reporting and measurements, with automated reports based on organizational ownership and structure, while at the same time providing individual teams reports about their specific progress.

Opus has built-in comparative abilities to help create positive competition between teams or departments while providing holistic visibility across the organization, regardless of the number or type of security tools used.

We’ve summarized how Opus can help you generate the most value from your Security Champions program by streamlining processes and saving valuable time and resources. From code scanning, software composition, and IAST to cloud security tools, Opus is best-poised to help you drive remediation the way you need it while ensuring your Security Champions get in the trenches with you and help you scale securely.

See the Opus Platform in Action

Cybersecurity Consolidation: The Key to Stronger Security

February 13, 2025

SSVC Explained: How It Transforms Vulnerability Prioritization

February 5, 2025

How to Achieve and Maintain FedRAMP Compliance

February 2, 2025

Cloud-to-Code Integration: Enhancing Security from Cloud to Codebase

January 25, 2025

Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): A Comprehensive Guide

January 14, 2025

Remediation as Security Immunization: Protecting Against Exploits, Malware, and Ransomware

January 25, 2025

Security Remediation Insights - Looking Back at 2024, Ahead to 2025

January 15, 2025

No-Code Automation in 2025: Choosing and Implementing Tools

January 14, 2025

Build vs. Buy: A Guide for Security Remediation Platforms

January 14, 2025

How To Design an Effective Vulnerability Management Program

January 14, 2025

Exposure Assessment Platforms (EAPs): A Cybersecurity Essential

November 20, 2024

NYDFS Cybersecurity Regulation: Key Compliance Steps

January 14, 2025

Is Python the Right Tool for Your Cyber Security Strategy?

January 14, 2025

What Is DORA Compliance? A Practical Guide

January 14, 2025

Opus' Ownership Detection & No-Code Workflow Builder

November 5, 2024

Remediation vs. Mitigation: Key Differences Explained

November 7, 2024

What Is Vulnerability Remediation & How It Works

January 14, 2025

Vulnerability Assessment: Definitions, Methodology & Tools

November 7, 2024

Wrapping Up Season One of "30 Min on: Vulnerability Management"

October 21, 2024

CVE and CVSS: Vulnerability Assessment & Severity Ratings

October 29, 2024

CVSS Scores: How They Enhance Vulnerability Assessment

February 12, 2025

What CVE Scores Mean for Your Cybersecurity Strategy

October 29, 2024

The 2025 Guide to Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

January 12, 2025

Secure SDLC: Why and How to Integrate Security In Your Development Life Cycle

October 20, 2024

Application Security Posture Management (ASPM): How It Works & Top Tools in 2025

January 12, 2025

How to Prioritize Vulnerabilities Effectively in 2025

January 12, 2025

The Opus Multi-Layer Prioritization Engine: What is it All About?

September 10, 2024

EPSS Score: Improving Vulnerability Prioritization in 2025

January 12, 2025

Opus Platform Explained: Cloud-Native Vulnerability Remediation

October 20, 2024

It’s Time to Get Proactive About Vulnerability Remediation

October 29, 2024

The Vulnerability Strikes Back - TABLETOP PART TWO

August 13, 2024

Opus Security Joins CrowdStrike Marketplace

September 29, 2024

Cloud-to-Code Integration for Comprehensive Remediation

January 15, 2025

Understanding CTEM: How Opus Security Can Help

September 22, 2024

This Is What Your Security Champions Program Is Missing

September 29, 2024

Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (RBVM) in a Cloud-Native World

October 7, 2024

How Business Impact Analysis Facilitates Effective Remediation

October 20, 2024

[Case Study] How Opus Solved the Puzzle of Disparate Tools and Alerts

October 7, 2024

It’s Time for Security Operations to Ditch Excel

February 13, 2025

Security Remediation Budgeting - Everything You Need to Know

October 20, 2024

How to Achieve More Effective Vulnerability Management?

August 13, 2024

Checklist: Tracking Down Key Stakeholders for Effective Security Remediation

October 2, 2024

Streamlining Security Remediation: The Convergence of CTEM and ASPM into a Single Operating Platform

September 22, 2024

How to Locate Key Stakeholders for Security Remediation

October 7, 2024

The Evolution of Vulnerability Remediation: From RBVM to Security Remediation Platforms

September 29, 2024

Practical Vulnerability Remediation - When Should You Act?

October 20, 2024

The Ultimate Remediation Lifecycle for Vulnerability Management

September 22, 2024

Global Leader in Content Solutions Streamlines Remediation with Opus

August 13, 2024

Opus Security helps Global Technology Company Connect Security Tools for More Effective Security Remediaiton

August 13, 2024

Opus Security's VP of Marketing shares her thoughts on B2B marketing in a recent DemandBase podcast.

August 13, 2024

Opus Security Wins 2023 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Award

October 20, 2024

Vulnerability Management - A Story

September 22, 2024

6 Ways Orchestration Reduces Cloud Security Risk

October 2, 2024

Move Beyond Shift Left and Shift Smart

October 20, 2024

3 Tips for Bridging the Remediation Developer/Security Gap

October 2, 2024

WAF With EKS, Using Only k8s Controllers

August 13, 2024

Opus Recognized in the 2023 Gartner® Emerging Tech: Security — The Future of Cyber Is Automated Moving Target Defense report.

August 13, 2024

Wiz identifies, Opus fixes.

August 13, 2024

Writing your Cloud Opus: A Deep Dive into Orchestrating your Cloud Security

August 13, 2024

Snow in April, Alert Monsters, and Connect Four: 5 Takeaways from our SecOps Chat

August 13, 2024

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

October 20, 2024

Why We Need a New Approach to Remediation in the Cloud

August 13, 2024

Introducing Opus: Orchestrating Remediation and Reducing Risk in the Cloud

September 29, 2024

This Is What Your Security Champions Program Is Missing

Read next

See the Opus Platform in Action