Key Points

• Lean and Agile are complementary methodologies to leverage for your cybersecurity needs.
• Lean reduces waste and improves overall efficiency, making for a streamlined, effective security team.
• Agile encourages adaptability through iteration, meaning your team can readily respond to threats as they arise.

Lean and Agile make for a potent combination when considering any cybersecurity operations. When taking a look at these two disparate methodologies, you’d be forgiven for thinking they might be ill-suited for building a culture of security.

That said, finding the synergies between the two enables a more resilient, efficient organization that readily adapts and roots out threats.

Lean is based on the likes of continuous improvement, reduction of wastes, and elimination of defects, which can be well-suited for any organization.

Agile, on the other hand, is more iterative, focusing on the people working rather than the processes in play.

When combining the two, you’ve got a winning combination that results in a resilient, adaptable organizational security posture.

Lean in Cybersecurity

Value and Waste

Before starting on the integration of a hybrid approach for your security posture, you’ll want to take the time to define what value is for your organization’s cybersecurity posture. This isn’t simply a matter of defining what is secure, but rather about protecting the vital assets that are critical to your daily operations.

Assets like data, servers, and workstations play a key role in any organization’s operations. Keeping those secure and identifying which are the most critical to your organization can help to maintain customer trust and maintain revenue even in the event of an incident.

Further, you’ll want to take a closer look at the toolchain in use for remediation of issues. Redundant tools and processes are non-value-added activities, and are waste in the strictest definition per Lean’s nomenclature. Complex approval processes should be reviewed and streamlined where necessary. Anything that slows down incident response is a prime target for improvement initiatives.

Flow

One of the most vital elements of a successful Lean implementation is the development of flow. You want a smooth, uninterrupted workflow. In cybersecurity, this would mean a smooth, consistent flow of actions from threat detection to incident response. The key here is to eliminate bottlenecks, making sure there are no hang-ups as your teams work to remediate issues as they arise.

You establish flow by eliminating wastes, which helps to ensure that your processes are operating efficiently and effectively.

Pull Systems

Another key area of Lean implementation is the use of a Pull system. This means that work isn’t pushed to a relevant member of your team, but rather pulled in where needed. For incident response, this means focusing on the most critical, high-priority threats and items first, rather than trying to address the complete systems in place.

Continuous Improvement

You can’t mention Lean without at least touching upon continuous improvement. A well-oiled security team is going to be learning and pursuing perfection constantly. Past incident responses present a prime opportunity to grow and evolve how your team approaches remediation. Further, you’ll be constantly optimizing processes and protocols to more effectively address evolving threats.

Continuous improvement isn’t just about optimization, but about making your organization’s security team into the best possible version of itself. This is one area of focus you’ll want to constantly be improving upon as you move forward.

Agile in Cybersecurity

Iteration

The key behind any successful use of Agile is breaking down monolithic projects into manageable chunks. In the methodology, these are referred to as sprints, taking mere days to a maximum of a week to accomplish. This constant cycle of iteration enables teams to work fairly quickly and is a boon for cybersecurity.

Instead of addressing the whole of the organization’s tech infrastructure, you’re able to compartmentalize it and respond more ably. As new incidents happen, teams can quickly move and effectively treat them.

Cross-Functional Teams

Cybersecurity is an element of your organization that should never be siloed. To this end, Agile does promote cross-functional teams, or DevSecOps, with developers and security personnel closely collaborating. Further, you’ll want to guarantee that cybersecurity isn’t just a responsibility your team shoulders, but rather something that is spread across the entire organization.

Adaptability

The killer feature behind Agile is its ability to adapt and change at the drop of a hat. Threats to your cybersecurity are constantly changing, with new vulnerabilities and 0-days being found just about daily. An Agile approach acknowledges this. Rather than following static, rigid SOP, you’re developing a team that can quickly change requirements and parameters for incident response, resulting in a more nimble and effective response.

Collaboration

Agile promotes collaboration with customers. In software development, this usually takes the form of user testing, feature requests, and surveys. In cybersecurity, you don’t have a conventional customer in the strictest sense. Instead, you’ll be looking to collaborate with stakeholders and the whole of the business through the use of training, security awareness, and implementing best practices to avoid breaches and incidents.

Synergy

We’ve highlighted how each of these methodologies can benefit cybersecurity, but we’ve yet to touch on the synergy that makes it such a powerful hybrid approach. Integrating key aspects of Lean and Agile can transform your incident response from a reactive, bottlenecked function into something far more resilient and adaptable.

High-Value Threats and Incident Response

Touching on the Lean concept of value, you should have key assets in mind in the event of a cybersecurity incident. When an incident does occur, you’ll be implementing your Pull system, but taking a more iterative approach to things. Sprints for incidents means you’re quickly addressing those critical assets and risks, maintaining business continuity, and minimizing downtime on the whole.

After an incident, you’ll want to conduct a retrospective, something common in Agile, where you review what went well and where you can improve your efforts. Future sprints and your cybersecurity processes on the whole will build upon the content of these post-mortems.

Reduce Alert Fatigue

If you’ve been in the tech industry for a while, you’re likely used to the constant deluge of false positives and redundant alerts when monitoring operations. These are effectively a form of waste, reducing your team’s response time to respond to low-level or non-existent threats. Instead, you’ll want to take the time to analyze these alerts. Identifying patterns should be relatively simple. From there, you can automate responses to low-priority, non-critical alerts, freeing your team to focus on more critical areas of concern.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Still ready to learn a little more? You might want to build on the foundation we’ve established today and look at some daily Kaizen practices that will improve your overall security posture. Kaizen is a Lean principle, focusing on constant, continuous improvement. When properly implemented, you’ll see a massive increase in your overall resiliency and security posture.

Additionally, you might want to take a closer look at other continuous improvement techniques that can adapt to the growing cybersecurity threats you’ll be facing. While Kaizen might address some of this, there are other key areas of focus you’ll want to keep in mind. Bad actors aren’t going away anytime soon, and as businesses rely more and more on digital tools, you’ll want to be ready for whatever comes your way.

Conclusion

Lean and Agile make for a potent combination when considering any cybersecurity operations. When striking up the right blend of synergies, you’re creating an organization that is well-suited for the constant threats the digital world holds. The key is iteration and continuous improvement, something that any security team benefits from.