Here's how you can integrate security into project lifecycles by collaborating with project managers.

Join project kick-off meetings and initial planning sessions. Discuss security requirements and potential risks from the start. Work with PMs to define clear security requirements and objectives. Ensure these requirements are included in the project scope and deliverables. Create security guidelines and best practices for the project. Conduct threat modeling and risk assessments. Identify potential security vulnerabilities and design mitigation strategies. Conduct security testing, including penetration testing and vulnerability assessments. Address identified issues before moving to the next phase. Schedule regular meetings with PMs to discuss security progress and issues. Use these meetings to update project status, review security.

Integrating security into project lifecycles involves collaborating closely with project managers to embed security considerations at every stage. This includes conducting risk assessments early in the planning phase, defining security requirements, and ensuring that security controls are implemented throughout development, testing, and deployment. Communication and collaboration with project teams are essential to raise awareness about security risks and ensure that security measures are effectively implemented without disrupting project timelines. Additionally, providing training and resources to project managers and teams on security best practices can enhance overall project security posture.

Make security the "how can we". This is critical for success. Engage your stakeholders and lead with generosity of your time and provide solutions. Understand the business use cases in place and the demands on the dev teams. Have an appreciation of whats important to them and engage to understand where they see things that can go wrong. If these (mini) threat models arise, then they clearly have a foundation in truth or need validating. Iterate in short, sharp cycles. Don's save it all to the end. Engage, engage, engage. Security is a service to the business and should be in the business of "how can we?"

Incorporating security from the beginning of a project is indeed critical. Engage your security team during the initiation and planning phases to assess risks and define security requirements. This early collaboration ensures that security measures are not retrofitted but are part of the initial design, reducing the need for costly changes later. By having security professionals contribute to project scope and objectives, you can identify potential vulnerabilities and seamlessly integrate security controls into the workflow.

I would say that there is a step even before the actual engagement phase. That is the phase of: awareness. This involves formulating goals, objectives, outcomes & value of having security as part of the project. Communication and messaging must be done to project leaders to give them a heads-up and let them know what's coming their way. You may spend a whole quarter doing just this even before getting into the engagement phase. This helps to judge the pulse, invite feedback, refine and improve, show transparency and good-will, set expectations, get stakeholder buy-in and reduce any pushback at later stages. Now that this has been achieved, it will be seamless to integrate security activities into the project lifecycle.

Conducting a thorough risk analysis with project managers is indeed crucial for integrating security effectively. Identify potential threats to the project's assets and evaluate their impact and likelihood. This analysis should inform the development of a risk management plan that includes mitigation strategies, such as encryption for data protection or access controls to limit user permissions. Regularly revisiting and updating the risk analysis throughout the project lifecycle helps adapt to new threats and changing project dynamics.

Cyber and information security cannot be about risk closure and avoidance. Its about risk management. Full stop! We have no other choice. But its so important to have a wide base and frame of thinking otherwise our risk analysis can be polarised our own models and cognitive biases. Speak with others. Follow the user and business journey and then look at tools that help such as encryption, secrets management, user access control etc. Run your risk analysis regularly with different feeds and starting points for breadth. It is not a won and done exercise.

The outcome of a security assessment is a report which contains the list of items to remediate. But this only tells part of the story. Project leaders need to have a 'risk view' of the report. This helps them understand what is the risk (of doing or not doing something), gives them inputs on scope and impact of the threat, contextualize the risk to their environment and finally take a decision on how to address the risk. Leaders would also be interested in understanding what efforts, expertise, cost and value can be derived from undertaking remediation activities. If 50 high-risk line-items can be remediated with 1 line of config change, then that offers high ROI. Hence, the risk analysis should be contextual and useful to stakeholders.

Designing with security in mind is indeed a proactive step towards a robust final product. Collaborate with project managers to ensure that security requirements are included in the design specifications. This may involve using secure coding practices, selecting reliable frameworks, or incorporating user authentication features. Considering security during the design phase can result in more resilient architectures and prevent common vulnerabilities from being coded into the system.

During the implementation phase, maintaining close collaboration with project managers is crucial to oversee the integration of security features. Ensure that developers adhere to secure coding guidelines and vet any third-party components for vulnerabilities. Conduct regular code reviews and security testing, such as penetration testing or static code analysis, to catch issues early when they are easier to fix. This oversight helps maintain the integrity of security measures throughout the development process.

Oversight is definitely an important part of integrating security into the SDLC. However, this oversight needs to have a positive and supportive nature and should not be perceived as authoritative and a mistake-pointing exercise. Once the security activities have been integrated, this will generate lots of reports, data, alerts, etc These need to be effectively communicated and streamlined through a single window interface to product teams, else it will be confusing and overwhelming for teams to deal with it. Hence, the relevant support should also be provided to product teams on a continuous basis to ensure they know exactly what to do, remediate items, improve their KPIs and reduce their risk exposure.

Validate, continuously. Being in the process that sees the failure of this aspect is humbling to say the least. I have said it elsewhere; validate what you think to be the case is indeed the case. Efficacy of controls or failure of a control is a major part of breaches now.