Partners, Customers Protecting Themselves

CF: Are you seeing improvement among partners and customers as far as doing the basic things to protect themselves?

Ryland: Yes, I definitely see more of an emphasis on the importance of this, IT modernization generally, but cloud being a big part of that. You really have to think of security from the start and design into your system from the beginning, understand the threat model and build and engineer a system that is more inherently secure as you develop it. And then the whole distinction between engineering and operations is collapsing because people are now doing DevOps, which is, I write code, but I also deploy and operate it, and then I build security into that pipeline.

So now where I see a very large improvement is a realization that we can’t treat security as a bolt-on at the end of a process. It has to permeate the process and we have to do what’s called “shift left” in the industry. It’s the jargon of, let’s bring our security engineering and our security concepts as far to the beginning as we can of the engineering and writing the code, and testing and deploying, and not treat it as the last layer that we add when everything else is done. And that’s a very broad industry trend that I think is helping and will improve security as we go forward.