DigitalOcean Decreases Security Debt with Secure Code Warrior

DigitalOcean Decreases Security Debt with Secure Code Warrior

DigitalOcean offers scalable compute resources and a suite of cloud solutions that enable developers to deploy, manage, and scale applications effortlessly. DigitalOcean’s products and services are delivered through their R&D teams who focus on delivering new products that enable developers and businesses to spend more time building software that changes the world.

Situation

DigitalOcean has grown rapidly over the years, and their engineering teams have expanded to support this growth, which has brought security challenges. With larger teams in place, DigitalOcean sought ways to ensure that their developers were skilled in identifying common patterns that arose in design reviews so that they could proactively prevent them from recurring. Ultimately, they wanted a program that would build their software security proficiency and put them into a proactive and offensive mindset when it came to secure code.

“We needed a solution that was developer specific, hands on, and focused on the risks that our organization was facing.”

Action

The Product Security team at DigitalOcean focuses on holistic vulnerability management, and they needed a hands-on solution that would allow developers to learn, test, and apply their knowledge — essentially building their security muscle for issues relevant to their organization.

Using Secure Code Warrior, they customized the right secure coding program that focused on specific vulnerabilities that they identified as prevalent during their security and design reviews.

Building programs with these basics provided their development teams with a strong foundation to focus on these identified issues.  The Secure Code Warrior agile learning platform allowed developers to review and identify code that had vulnerabilities, and understand the impact of the code by ‘seeing the vulnerability in motion’ through learning modules. This combination was effective in building the developers’ security posture and knowledge base.

Results

One of the most notable outcomes was the ability to quickly and regularly reinforce secure coding practices, which led to a marked decrease in security debt across teams. Overall, DigitalOcean has found that teams trained with SCW were not only more adept at identifying and mitigating security issues, but they also now have the confidence to push the boundaries of innovation without compromising security.

This reduction in security debt translated into increased productivity and efficiency, as developers spent less time addressing security flaws and more time focusing on developing new features and improvements. The enhanced security posture of these teams also meant that DigitalOcean could deliver higher quality, more secure products to their customers, strengthening their competitive edge in the industry.

What's Next

Looking ahead, DigitalOcean is excited about the potential of SCW Trust Score to further enhance their security training and benchmarking capabilities. SCW Trust Score will enable DigitalOcean to draw detailed comparisons across teams and departments providing a clear picture of their overall security posture.
As they continue to evolve and adapt to the ever-changing security landscape, DigitalOcean is confident their engineering and developer teams will not only continue to reduce security debt, but also use the security surplus they earn with Secure Code Warrior to push the boundaries on developer productivity, velocity and innovation.

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