An increasingly competitive environment is forcing companies to innovate faster in order to provide more value to customers and other stakeholders and bring products and services to the market more quickly. They are called to do this by taking full advantage of the opportunities afforded by a host of new digital technologies and their impact on society in initiatives commonly called digital transformation. This is, in turn, driving cultural changes such as DevOps in these organizations as they reorganize to be more agile. At the same time, technological innovations such as the cloud, microservice architectures, and continuous integration / continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines are being adopted to support the increased pace of development and more easily address scaling requirements.
This revolution presents both risks and opportunities for security leaders. Forward-thinking security executives view this transition as a clean-slate opportunity to “get security right” and will restructure their teams to deeply-embed security as a business enabler and innovation accelerator that can help their organizations properly balance the risks and rewards presented to them. Critical to this approach will be for the security teams to proactively provide guidance and resources to business units and application teams engaging in digital transformation projects as their organizations move to adopt techniques and technologies that unfamiliar to the development teams but critical in the rollout of these initiatives.
This paper offers steps that security professionals can follow to embrace digital transformation, and engage their transformation leadership to include security in future-state systems and software.
