DevSecOps Initiative (2022/23) - Lead Platform Architect
The Customer: Internal Engineering and Product Teams
The Users: 400-person global Engineering and Product organization.
The Challenge
In early 2022, our 400-person engineering organization operated in distinct silos. Development, Security, and Operations teams worked independently, leading to a reactive security model where security reviews were manual and occurred late in the development cycle. This created significant delays and friction. Without a standardized approach to secure coding, vulnerabilities were frequently discovered in production, resulting in a high volume of manually-triaged security incidents. This consumed valuable engineering time, elevated organizational risk, and made the cost of remediation unsustainable.
The Approach
To overcome these obstacles, I designed and led the initiative to embed a DevSecOps culture across the organization. The strategy was built on three foundational pillars:
- Cross-Functional Integration: I broke down organizational silos by establishing a "Security Champions" Centre of Excellence (CoE), a multi-disciplinary team with members from engineering, product, and security. This unified team was responsible for creating and managing a coherent security strategy, integrating security considerations directly into product planning and sprint cycles to ensure it was a core requirement from the outset.
- CI/CD Standardization and Automation: I created a standardized CI/CD framework with security baked in. We integrated Mend.io for open-source dependency scanning and GitHub Advanced Security for static application security testing (SAST). These tools were configured as automated quality gates within the pull request process, providing developers with immediate feedback to fix vulnerabilities before code was merged.
- Intelligent Integration & Reporting: I integrated our security tooling directly into our central operational platforms. All findings were streamed into our global SIEM, providing the security team with a single pane of glass for real-time visibility. Furthermore, we built an automation workflow to push critical vulnerabilities directly into ServiceNow, automatically creating, prioritizing, and assigning tickets to the correct teams. This replaced a chaotic manual process and provided clear accountability.
The Outcome
The execution of this strategy fundamentally transformed our capabilities and delivered significant results within the first year. The standardized CI/CD pipeline and automated security gates empowered developers to catch and fix issues early. Operationally, the integrated SIEM and automated ServiceNow workflows led to a 70% reduction in manually actioned security-related incidents within just six months. This automation and "shift-left" approach resulted in cost savings of over $1 million in the first year related to manual triage and remediation. Ultimately, the initiative removed security as a bottleneck, fostering a durable, security-first culture and improving development velocity across the organization.