Transforming security from an external constraint into an integral part of engineering excellence
Contents
- Why Security Became a Silo
- How to Think About Security as Engineering Work
- Reframing Security Debt as Technical Debt
- Practical Integration Strategies
- Making It Feel Natural
- Building the Right Culture
- The Path Forward
If you’ve ever heard a developer sigh and say “now I have to deal with the security team,” you’re witnessing one of the most counterproductive dynamics in modern software development. This reaction isn’t born from laziness or indifference—it’s the natural result of how we’ve traditionally organized and thought about security in engineering organizations. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
The goal isn’t just to make security less painful for engineers. It’s to fundamentally transform how we think about building software, so that security considerations become as natural and automatic as checking for null values or handling edge cases. When we achieve this transformation, security stops being something that slows down development and starts being something that makes development more robust, predictable, and ultimately faster.
The Hidden Costs of Security Silos
Before we dive into solutions, let’s understand why this transformation matters so much. When security operates as a separate function that reviews and approves engineering work, we create a system with built-in inefficiencies and tensions.
Think about what happens when security is treated as a gate rather than a foundation. Engineers build features with their understanding of requirements, often making architectural decisions that seem reasonable in isolation. Then, weeks or months later, a security review identifies fundamental issues that require significant rework. This isn’t just frustrating for the engineers involved—it’s incredibly expensive for the organization.
Consider a real-world analogy: imagine if structural engineering was handled the same way many organizations handle security. You’d have architects design buildings, construction crews build them, and only then would structural engineers review the plans to check if the building would collapse. This approach would be obviously absurd because we understand that structural integrity must be designed in from the beginning, not bolted on afterward.
The same principle applies to software security, but somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that retrofitting security is acceptable in ways we’d never accept for other quality attributes. This acceptance comes at a cost that extends far beyond the immediate rework required.
Why Security Became a Silo
To understand how to integrate security with engineering, we first need to understand how they became separated in the first place. This separation didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t the result of a conscious decision to make development more difficult.
In the early days of computing, systems were largely isolated and threats were minimal. Security wasn’t a primary concern because the attack surface was tiny and the stakes were relatively low. As systems became more connected and valuable, security concerns grew, but the response was to treat security as a specialized discipline requiring deep expertise in cryptography, networking protocols, and threat modeling.
This approach followed a pattern we’ve seen with other specialized skills in engineering. When web development was new, companies hired separate “web developers” because regular software engineers didn’t understand HTML, CSS, and browser quirks. Similarly, when mobile development emerged, organizations created dedicated mobile teams because the platform-specific knowledge was seen as highly specialized.
The difference is that while web and mobile development eventually became integrated skills that most engineers learned, security remained specialized. This created a self-reinforcing cycle where security work was handed off to specialists, which meant regular engineers never developed security intuition.
The compliance and audit requirements that emerged in the 2000s further entrenched this separation. When regulations like SOX and later GDPR required formal security processes, many organizations responded by creating security teams to handle compliance rather than building security capabilities into their engineering processes. These teams naturally became gatekeepers, reviewing code and architecture after the fact rather than being involved in design decisions.
The tooling landscape also reinforced separation. Early security tools were often standalone products that required specialized knowledge to operate. They weren’t integrated into development workflows and produced output that was difficult for engineers to interpret or act upon. This meant that using security tools effectively required dedicated security personnel, further justifying the separation.
Perhaps most importantly, security and engineering teams developed different mental models. Security professionals learned to think in terms of threat actors, attack vectors, and defense in depth. Engineers thought in terms of features, performance, and user experience. These different perspectives, while both valuable, created communication gaps that made collaboration more difficult.
How to Think About Security as Engineering Work
The key to breaking down these silos is recognizing that security is fundamentally about building robust, reliable systems. When we frame it this way, security becomes a quality attribute of good engineering rather than a separate discipline.
Consider how we think about performance optimization. Engineers don’t see performance work as separate from their regular duties because they understand that performance is an intrinsic quality of well-designed software. They learn to write efficient algorithms, optimize database queries, and design scalable architectures because these skills make them better engineers overall. Security should be viewed through the same lens.
Security-conscious engineering is really about building systems that behave predictably under adverse conditions. This is the same mindset that leads engineers to handle edge cases, validate inputs, and design fault-tolerant systems. When a developer checks for null pointers, they’re practicing defensive programming. When they validate user input, they’re preventing both security vulnerabilities and application crashes. These aren’t security practices tacked onto engineering work—they’re examples of good engineering that happens to improve security.
Let’s explore how different aspects of security align with core engineering principles. Authentication and authorization are fundamentally about data modeling and access control. Designing a good authentication system requires the same skills used to design any API: understanding user workflows, managing state correctly, and handling edge cases gracefully. The fact that it also prevents unauthorized access is a natural consequence of good design, not an additional burden.
Cryptography, often seen as mysterious and separate from regular programming, is really just another form of data transformation. Engineers routinely work with serialization, compression, and encoding, all of which involve transforming data from one representation to another. Encryption is conceptually similar, with the added property that the transformation is reversible only with the correct key. Once engineers understand this framing, cryptographic operations become less mysterious and more approachable.
Reframing Security Debt as Technical Debt
One of the most powerful mental shifts you can create in your engineering organization is helping people understand that security debt and technical debt are fundamentally the same thing. Both represent shortcuts taken today that make tomorrow’s work harder, and both accumulate interest over time.
Technical debt is something every engineer understands deeply. It’s the shortcuts you take today that make tomorrow’s work harder. Poor API design, tangled dependencies, and inadequate test coverage all create technical debt that slows down future development. Security debt follows the exact same pattern—it’s deferred security considerations that accumulate interest over time, making future development increasingly difficult and risky.
Consider this parallel: when engineers see poorly designed APIs or tangled dependencies, they immediately recognize the technical debt and its impact on velocity. Security debt works identically. Hardcoded credentials, overprivileged access, or unvalidated inputs are architectural flaws that slow down development just like any other form of technical debt.
The beauty of this framing is that it connects security concerns to concepts engineers already understand and care about. When you point out that a security vulnerability will require refactoring the entire authentication system, engineers can relate that to other technical debt they’ve dealt with. They understand that fixing the problem early is always cheaper than fixing it later.
This perspective also helps engineers see security work as an investment in future velocity rather than a tax on current productivity. Just as refactoring tangled code makes future feature development easier, implementing proper security patterns makes it easier to build new features securely.
Practical Integration Strategies
Understanding the theory is important, but let’s talk about how to actually make this transformation happen in practice. The key is making security checks feel like quality checks that engineers are already accustomed to performing.
1. Make Security Feel Like Quality Assurance
The key is making security checks feel like quality checks. Just as you wouldn’t push code without running tests, security validations should feel equally automatic and necessary.
2. Integrate Into Existing Workflows
Start by embedding security practices into existing workflows. When engineers already run linters for code quality, adding security linters feels natural. When they’re accustomed to code reviews for logic and style, including security considerations in those same reviews doesn’t feel like additional overhead.
3. Leverage Automation as Your Foundation
Automation is your strongest ally here. Security scanning that happens automatically in CI/CD pipelines requires no extra mental effort from developers. It becomes part of the environment, like syntax highlighting or auto-completion. The goal is to make secure practices the path of least resistance.
4. Reframe Security as a Quality Attribute
Help engineers see security as a quality attribute, not a separate discipline. Performance, maintainability, and security are all aspects of well-crafted software. You wouldn’t ship slow code because “performance isn’t my job” - the same mindset should apply to security.
5. Use Engineering Language for Security Concepts
Frame security practices as engineering best practices. Input validation isn’t “security work” - it’s defensive programming. Access controls aren’t security theater - they’re proper API design. Encryption isn’t paranoia - it’s data integrity. When you present security concepts using language and frameworks that engineers already understand, adoption becomes much smoother.
6. Provide Context Through Documentation and Examples
Documentation and examples play a crucial role here. Instead of separate security guidelines, integrate security considerations into regular coding standards and architectural patterns. Show engineers how to build secure features, not just how to avoid insecure ones. Provide code examples that demonstrate secure patterns in the context of real business logic.
Making It Feel Natural
The goal is for security considerations to become as automatic as checking for null values or handling edge cases. This happens through practice and positive reinforcement. When security practices help solve real engineering problems—like when input validation prevents both security issues and weird application bugs—engineers start to internalize these patterns.
Help engineers see how security issues often manifest as engineering problems. A SQL injection vulnerability isn’t just a security flaw; it’s a data layer design problem. Cross-site scripting issues aren’t just security concerns; they’re evidence of poor separation between data and presentation logic. Buffer overflows aren’t just security vulnerabilities; they’re memory management errors that can cause all sorts of application instability.
One powerful exercise to reinforce this thinking is to have engineers trace through how business logic vulnerabilities can emerge from the same root causes as other software defects. When they see that race conditions can cause both data consistency issues and privilege escalation vulnerabilities, the connection between security and engineering becomes concrete and intuitive.
Building the Right Culture
The transformation you’re seeking isn’t just about processes and tools—it’s about fundamentally changing how your engineering culture views security. This cultural shift requires intentional effort and consistent reinforcement over time.
1. Foster Ownership Through Involvement
Create an environment where engineers feel ownership of security rather than feeling policed by it. This means involving them in security architecture decisions and showing them how their security-conscious choices impact the overall system resilience. When engineers understand the “why” behind security requirements, they’re much more likely to embrace them.
2. Celebrate Security as Engineering Excellence
Recognition matters too. When engineers proactively identify and fix security issues, celebrate it the same way you would celebrate performance optimizations or elegant solutions to complex problems. Make security consciousness part of what defines a skilled engineer in your organization.
3. Transform Resistance into Enablement
Address resistance points directly. Engineers often resist security because they associate it with saying “no” to features or slowing down delivery. Transform this by showing how good security practices actually accelerate development. Proper authentication systems make user management easier. Well-designed authorization models simplify feature development. Secure coding practices prevent the costly debugging sessions that come from vulnerabilities discovered later.
The Path Forward
Making this transformation successful requires patience and persistence. Like any cultural change, it won’t happen overnight. Start small, celebrate wins, and gradually expand the scope of integration. Focus on making security practices feel helpful rather than obstructive.
Remember that the goal isn’t to turn every engineer into a security expert. The goal is to give them enough security intuition that they naturally make secure choices during normal development work, and to create an environment where security considerations are part of the engineering conversation from the very beginning of any project.
When done right, engineers will start to feel uncomfortable shipping code without proper security considerations, the same way they’d feel uncomfortable shipping untested code. This isn’t about adding more work—it’s about building security consciousness into the engineering excellence you’re already striving for.
The benefits extend far beyond reduced vulnerabilities. Organizations that successfully integrate security into engineering often find they ship features faster, spend less time on emergency patches, and build more robust systems overall. Security becomes an enabler of velocity rather than an impediment to it.
This transformation is challenging, but it’s also one of the most impactful changes you can make to your engineering organization. When security becomes just good engineering, everyone wins: engineers feel more empowered, security teams can focus on higher-level threats, and the organization builds more trustworthy software.
What challenges have you faced in integrating security into your engineering practices? What strategies have worked best in your organization? The conversation around security-engineering integration is evolving rapidly, and every team’s experience adds valuable lessons for the broader community.
Feel free to contact me for any suggestions and feedbacks. I would really appreciate those.
Thank you for reading!