Familiarity breeds likeability

Familiarity breeds likeability. It’s why I, a grown adult, still think powdered mac and cheese is 10x the versions made with actual cheese. Are your teams’ faces familiar around the rest of your company?

When we only show up for problems, we very quickly get associated in our colleagues' collective psyche with negative thoughts. You become associated with the existence of problems rather than solving them.

This brings several barriers to building an effective security program. When people associate you with negativity, they're much less likely to share potential issues with you, meaning you won't find out about the issue until it's too late. You’re also unlikely to be brought into projects early when you can have the greatest impact.

Instead of “We're about to start this major project and we would love your help with threat modeling and secure design” you’ll get “We've been working on this project for the last 12 months and are about to release on Friday, would your team like to take a look?”

By ensuring your teams do regular check-ins across the business - HR, marketing, sales, support, engineering, product, you’re setting the stage for ongoing positive interactions that will keep you informed of potential issues and better positioned to make smart decisions about them at the early stages when there’s still time to affect the outcomes.

Even if there's no specific security implication that needs to be discussed, understanding their end of the business and taking the time to build a relationship will pay dividends. A positive connection with the other teams means they're more likely to go the extra mile to help you out with personnel issues or with making your security white paper look pretty. Sales teams will be more willing to push back against unreasonable demands from customers and engineers will let you know about upcoming projects in the early stages.

Security is a team sport.

If your team isn’t regularly meeting with peers and strengthening connections across the organization, you're missing a golden opportunity to bring others into the game, providing the coverage that your team could never have acting alone.