This Is What Your Security Champions Program Is Missing

Roee Shohat, Head of Go to Market

May 9, 2024

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.

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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.