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What is Zero Friction?

Zero Friction is a term coined by Cloudanix to describe a state of harmony between engineering, DevOps, and security teams. When there is Zero Friction, teams are able to work together effectively to deliver secure software at speed.

Cloudanix enables Zero Friction in businesses so that they can create and manage a more effective and efficient security posture.

How does Cloudanix helps you achieve Zero Friction?

Identifying and prioritizing risks: As we know not all security risks are created equal. Security teams need to be able to identify and prioritize risks so that they can focus their efforts on the most important areas.
Automation: There are always a number of security tasks that can be automated. Investing in this capability and automating these tasks can free up security engineers to focus on more strategic work.
Use metrics to track progress: Security teams need to be able to track their progress and measure the impact of their work. This will help them to identify areas where they can improve.
Provide easy-to-use tooling: Security teams should provide clear and concise guidance to engineering teams on how to implement security controls. This can be enabled by tooling that is easy to use. This will help to avoid confusion and delays.
Intelligent workflows: Maintaining Excel sheets to manage exclusions, acknowledgments, approvals and such is passe. Intelligent tooling providing intelligent workflows needs to be adopted by the teams to collaborate better.

These are some of the ways Cloudanix enables businesses to save their teams a bunch of time and effort. This begs us to ponder why these problems arise and how tooling can help efficiently manage them.

Why does friction arise?

Different teams are incentivized differently. Developers are incentivized to ship new features and build systems that are reliable, high-performing, and low-cost. Security teams are incentivized to minimize incidents and ensure everything conforms to strict protocols. This disparity creates a systematic tension.

The development teams are under pressure to write code and deliver it to the market as quickly as possible. Anything that gets in the way or prevents that delivery is seen as a hindrance to productivity and success.

Whereas, the security teams are under pressure to ensure that products hit the market without flaws and vulnerabilities that can lead to breaches. Their work is based on a security-first philosophy, and anything that goes against that is seen as a negative. Given these two viewpoints, how could there not be friction when these two units come together?

Effects of friction on an organization?

Where there is friction, the two sides may end up avoiding or ignoring each other. This could lead to pausing or stopping communicating, or at best communicating sporadically or poorly. If the security and development teams stop collaborating, are working at odds with one another, or don’t have a common vision for delivering software capabilities needed by the organization, in a secure manner that could lead to big problems for the organization as a whole. Friction causes the team members to be out of sync affecting productivity. Some of the effects of friction on an organization include

Delays in product delivery
Products in the latter phase of the SDLC may need constant revisions
Friction leads to insecure products
May result in data breaches and other unwanted incidents

How does Cloudanix help to reduce the friction between engineering and security teams?

These days there is a lot of discussion about the need to reduce and/or eliminate friction across functions, not just between the engineering and security teams. Here will talk about the friction that exists between the engineering and security teams at organizations. Friction isn’t just about making the development environment a more pleasant place to work, it’s about enabling organizations to produce more secure products. There needs to be a fundamental agreement that security is integrated throughout the process.

Security teams expect the developers to take on more of the burden of security, while, the developers feel why they are being asked to do additional work on top of what they’re already doing. Security cannot be viewed as an afterthought, nor should it become burdensome to the development team. With the right tools in place, teams can identify and address possible vulnerabilities promoting greater harmony among security and development teams resulting in faster delivery and secure software.

The existence of friction between security and development factions reinforces the need for automating security. It’s easier to implement security controls from the very beginning, which will reduce friction and at the same time improve security.

Cloudanix enables Zero friction through the security platform and gets multiple teams on the same page promoting frictionless collaboration, ensuring faster and secure deployment and management.

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