Better collaboration between cloud engineers and security teams should grow naturally with cloud maturity. You want to get past security being seen as the “department of no” by the cloud team. Such efforts need to come from management and the teams themselves through old-fashioned relationship building, data sharing, and other cross-team efforts. With a little proactivity and cross-team communications, you can break down traditional silos to ensure both teams can best support the other when a breach occurs.
Here are some tips on how to improve collaboration between cloud engineers and cybersecurity teams:
1. Ask questions up front; talk early and openly
Wayne Anderson, a security architect in Microsoft’s Modern Work Office of the CTO, stresses that security—safeguarding system users’ trust and privacy—is the responsibility of everyone in the business. He recommends both teams to ask questions about how they can make security more effortless and less intrusive. Anderson also recommends that both teams discuss how to remove friction so that approvals and onboarding of critical resources such as budget, identity and access management, or domain assignment happen faster.
Look for venues such as team stand-ups and shared online channels to ask questions. If necessary, the teams should work out up front how to best ask questions of one another to save time and effort.
