CISOs and AppSec professionals are finding themselves in an increasingly fraught position: Protect more assets, ship more code, reduce a bigger attack surface, and do it with rapidly diminishing financial resources. It’s an inescapable fact that cybersecurity is a cost center, and despite an organization’s security program being what stands in the way of a threat actor making them tomorrow’s disastrous headline, security leaders must find ways to do more with less. It is imperative that they seek viable long-term solutions for reducing vulnerabilities, meeting growing compliance needs, and considering security as early as possible in the SDLC.

World-class CISOs are rising to the occasion, leading holistic security programs that enhance customer trust, brand reputation, and utilize all the tools available to them to create undeniable value. It starts with a strategic, preventative approach to common security pitfalls, and leaving behind the mentality that there is never enough time, resources, or personnel to maintain security excellence. The potential for developers to be central to a defensive security strategy is immense, and they can be enabled with the right knowledge to transform their approach to coding and shift to a security-first mindset.

In this presentation,  Matias Madou will reveal, based on interviews and key research with CISOs, the six critical steps security leaders can take to execute incredible developer-focused training programs that reduce risk, provide company-wide benefit, and shift negative security sentiment in the development cohort, with:

• Realistic security maturity assessments: what does success look like in your organization?
• Logistics strategies to streamline burdensome tech stacks and utilize people power
• Developer upskilling, including benchmarking and growing key security skills with knowledge that leads to transformed behavior 
• Identifying security champions
• Growing and maintaining a positive, responsible, and thriving security culture.