Key Points

• Agile sprints accelerate remediation.
• Security becomes a prioritized item in your backlog with Agile.
• Automation and swarming allow for faster, safer responses while keeping the threat to your organization at a minimum.

Modern cybersecurity practices require speed, something that traditional ways of managing departments like Waterfall won’t accommodate.

However, by utilizing Agile sprints and other tools from the methodology, you can set a rapid cadence that is focused on security, stability, and minimizing downtime.

Further, you can make it so your security team is constantly embedding security into new machines, implementing fixes quickly, and relying on the likes of automation to detect and verify threats and vulnerabilities.

When combined with other top security practices, you’re minimizing risk, increasing your security posture, and leading to a higher overall level of operation for your cybersecurity operations.

Let’s dive in and look at why you’ll want to use Agile sprints, and some of the core benefits behind them in cybersecurity.

How Agile Sprints Change Remediation

Vulnerabilities aren’t just technical debt, but rather a significant risk to your organization when left unchecked. Findings from NIST and CISA have both determined that the faster a team can remediate a vulnerability, the less financial impact an organization can face. This runs counter to more traditional methods of handling systems, with patches and hotfixes deployed quarterly or as needed. Leaving systems exposed for weeks or months is a recipe for disaster, but you don’t have to react when considering Agile sprints.

Shorter Feedback Loops

One of the biggest advantages of Agile sprints is their duration. You’re looking at a maximum of four weeks per sprint, which naturally shortens the response time needed to handle most vulnerabilities. Automated security tests like SAST, DAST, and dependency scanning should be integrated into the pipeline at the start, with security being a focus rather than something added on later. Further, this allows your team to catch things from the start, rather than waiting for it to hit production or deliverables. By catching these vulnerabilities early, you maintain business operations and customer trust without impacting your output.

Security as a Backlog Item

Speaking from personal experience, security concerns often got left on the back burner at some of my former places of employment. A sad fact of doing any sort of security work with traditional frameworks is that more pressing vulnerabilities and the like aren’t treated with the level of severity that is needed. That said, when looking at Agile sprints, you can simply just place those in the backlog, handling them as needed. You can even prioritize said items, based on severity and impact, to make sure remediations are deployed quickly and effectively.

Swarming

One of the core functions of Agile as a methodology is the promotion of cross-functional teams in the workplace. These are often small, nimble teams, which have their benefits. When a critical vulnerability emerges, developers, security personnel, and normal technical staff can swarm the issue. This allows for the full cycle of remediation, like triage, patching, testing, and reintegration into the wider network. Swarming also greatly reduces the handoff time, resulting in faster handling of core issues.

Automation at the Core

As mentioned earlier, automation should play a key role in any integration of Agile sprints in your security operations. Agile itself thrives on automation, as it allows for more complex issues to be targeted by human personnel while the tedious, busywork is relegated to the machines. When embracing automation, you’re freeing up plenty of human resources to handle more pressing security concerns as they arise.

Risk-Based Prioritization

Not every vulnerability that surfaces is going to need immediate remediation. It is better to take an approach where you’re constantly analyzing attack surface area in relation to mission-critical assets within your infrastructure. In time, this will lead to the categorization of emerging threats, with dangerous items needing fixes now, while less pressing items can be addressed in later sprints.

A Sprint Playbook for Faster Remediation

Ready for a basic game plan to get your organization up and running? The playbook we’ll be constructing is broad in a general sense, as you’ll need to customize things to your organization’s needs. However, it should provide a solid foundation to get you up and running with minimal hassle.

Embed Security Checks

From the start, you should be considering shift-left practices. You’ll want to directly integrate SAST, SCA, and DAST or IAST into your pull request pipelines. Findings will be discovered, but it will more than likely be during development rather than out in production. You can take this a step further and automate triage and isolation strategies as needed.

Convert Findings Into Sprints

Any system that is big enough and complex enough is going to have plenty of vulnerabilities arise over time. It becomes critical that you take those findings and create backlog items with priority, owner, acceptance tests, and an estimate for remediation time. Rank them based on risk criteria like exposure and impact.

Reserve Sprint Capacity

You don’t want to devote a sprint to a given task and then find you’ve done no security work. You’ll want to reserve at least 10 to 20% of your team’s capacity for security-related tasks. This helps to keep feature development on schedule for the whole organization, but also makes sure that critical security fixes aren’t derailing deliverables.

Form Swarm Teams for Critical CVEs

Critical problems are going to arise, and they won’t be in a backlog. As such, you’ll want to trigger a mini-sprint of sorts, allowing your cross-functional team to swarm the issue and fix it as needed. We touched on this already, but you can likely see a swarm completely fix an issue before the sprint window closes.

Automate Verification and Rollback

Automation is going to be a natural part of any Agile deployment, and you’ll want to put in the work to automate regression suites, tests, and deployment where possible. This allows more mundane fixes to be validated, tested, and deployed without human intervention. It has the bonus of being easily rolled back quickly if needed.

Measure and Iterate

Finally, you’ll want to track some key metrics while conducting your Agile sprints. KPIs like Mean Time to Detect, Mean Time to Remediate, and % vulnerabilities remediated within 7/30/90 days by severity are all valuable data points to gather. When going toward your continuous improvement cycles, you can reference these metrics during retrospectives to act as a beacon for later efforts.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Ready to keep going? You might want to take a closer look at how Six Sigma can help educational facilities. While the methodology is best known for manufacturing, it is well-suited for any industry you can imagine. Our recent mini case studies took a closer look at some real-world deployments of Six Sigma and the far-reaching impact it had on these institutions.

Additionally, you might want to take a closer look at how Hoshin Kanri can foster an environment of cross-functional collaboration. While the approach is best known for setting long-term strategic vision, it also provides ample opportunities for your workforce to take ownership of goals and work together to achieve great things.

Conclusion

Agile sprints are a fantastic way to take charge of your vulnerability remediation. Time is a fleeting resource when looking at any sort of security issues in business, and being able to quickly address issues as they arise is going to be the secret to continued success with an agile, capable workforce. Taking an iterative approach also means you’re addressing vulnerabilities proactively, rather than reacting when everything goes wrong.