Key Points

• Kaizen fosters a proactive cybersecurity response by committing to daily, incremental improvements.
• Empowering employees and making security part of regular operations turns it into a shared responsibility across the entire organization.
• Standardized work, open communication, and leadership commitment are key to sustained gains and the success of any Kaizen efforts.

The world of cybersecurity and data management rarely stays still, but that doesn’t stop some organizations from relying on large, sweeping initiatives, usually following an audit. This might see organizations making changes based on a quarterly audit, rolling out tools gradually, and seldom taking the time to practice breach or incident response. That’s fine for organizations where security isn’t a top priority, but just about any company is going to want something more.

By using Kaizen, organizations can start down a different path rooted in small, iterative improvements. Kaizen shifts corporate culture as well, with employee empowerment and resilience becoming common elements of any organization. While this philosophy is primarily seen in manufacturing, at least under methodologies like Lean, Kaizen applies to security operations. Threats move quickly, systems are constantly changing, and organizations need to keep pace. Today, we’re looking at why Kaizen might be the right step for your cybersecurity operations.

From Big Moves to Regular Habits

At its core, Kaizen emphasizes the need for incremental changes rather than drastic overhauls. You want to focus on the attainable, quick wins, which often can be done daily. For cybersecurity, this presents itself as a shift away from the big, broad moves that might happen once a quarter or so. Instead, you’re gearing your team up toward incremental improvements, daily stand-up meetings, and iteration.

Embedding improvement into daily routines, rather than as a one-off project, allows your security teams to act more proactively, rather than being highly reactive in the event of an incident breach. It isn’t about simply improving security posture on the whole, but rather about making security part of any team member’s daily routine.

Empowering Employees

Kaizen isn’t just intended for the senior management, but is instead all-encompassing. As you’ll see later on, improvements take root across the entire organization. For cybersecurity, this places your team in an interesting position. In my experience, security and technology operations were generally siloed off from the rest of daily operations, with exceptions made when something went wrong.

Instead, you want to make security part of the inner workings of your entire organization. This invites cross-functional collaboration, sure, but it also gets everyone involved in bolstering your security posture. As we’ve seen in the past, it only takes one uninformed worker to compromise technology stacks at some organizations. Empowering your employees and allowing them to champion security across the entire organization only stands to benefit your technology infrastructure.

Daily Routines and Visibility

We touched on the daily routines of Kaizen briefly, but there is more to the philosophy than just looking for easy, quick wins. Making use of tools like Kanban boards can help keep your team on track when looking at security. However, you might want to take a closer look at some of the structured problem-solving methodologies contained within Kaizen, like Gemba walks. Gemba walks are fairly straightforward. You go to where the work is being performed, observe your team in action, and make notes of any potential improvements needed.

Visualizing key metrics like Mean Time to Remediate, rule exceptions, and open vulnerabilities acts as a roadmap for potential projects, illuminating larger pain points in current security operations. Further, making use of practices like Gemba walks helps to place security into workflows across the entire organization.

Quality at the Source Results in Security by Default

One of the core principles of Kaizen is quality at the source. That is a bit nebulous when considering cybersecurity, however. Simply put, you want to shift priorities toward detecting defects earlier on. Vulnerabilities are caught early on, configurations are validated before being put in action, and potential misconfigurations are fixed rather than allowed into production.

This might take process redesign and considerable culture change to fully align with the implementation of Kaizen in the workplace. However, your front-line employees and security should feel empowered and take ownership. In turn, this makes it so your whole organization can stop and improve upon something when it might run afoul of security practices.

A Shared Language of Improvement

Kaizen isn’t just a toolbox, as we’ve gone on about today, but a shared philosophy and mindset that takes root across an entire organization. For security, this translates to Kaizen not just being an approach centered around improvement, but rather part of how you’re increasing your security posture. It isn’t just about incident response, but rather about a cycle of continuous improvement that will see your attack surfaces hardened. Feedback loops are heavily encouraged, along with suggestions where possible.

The point of Kaizen isn’t about just improving things, but rather about making this part of the mindset of every person involved in your security workflows.

Cross-Functional Collaboration to Eliminate Siloing

As I touched on earlier, it is too common for organizations to silo off security operations. Cybersecurity personnel are only called upon in the event of an incident, and by then, the damage is usually done. That said, it doesn’t have to be that way. By incorporating security practices into your daily Kaizen efforts, you can do away with silos entirely.

Cross-functional collaboration isn’t just a suggestion at this point, but a necessity. Everyone from senior leadership all the way to front-line employees is part of the security process, and it should be an integrated, shared activity across the entire organization. A cyber attack isn’t going to come as a result of something the security team has failed to do, speaking from experience, but rather something outside of your technology department.

Measurement, Standardization, and Feedback Loops

Small improvements can begin to add up, but it won’t mean much without metrics to guide the way. Taking those improvements, quantifying, validating, and eventually standardizing them will make a world of difference for your operations going forward. For cybersecurity, this can be a somewhat nebulous concept to nail down, but you’ll likely be looking at improvements implemented, the time between discovering and remediating vulnerabilities, and the reduction of vulnerabilities across the board.

Leadership Engagement

Any of the measures we’ve discussed today mean nothing without leadership buy-in and commitment. Making such a substantial culture shift won’t happen on its own. Kaizen models leadership involvement, training, and much more that reflect directly upon leadership. As such, this means your management needs to walk the walk by participating in stand-ups, reviewing improvement boards, and scheduling Kaizen events, among other tasks. Failing to do so runs the risk of the entire security effort falling back on old habits.

Incremental Improvements for Resilience

During my time in tech, nothing was a bigger pain in the neck than dealing with budgetary concerns. However, you don’t have to wait for next year’s budget to start making some lasting changes. Giving some attention to your daily operations and making small improvements can go a long way toward increasing your security posture. Working on basic things like increasing response time can also do wonders for your organization. You’ve always got things you could be working on, which don’t require big monetary investments to get rolling.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Ready to start the work week right? You might want to take a closer look at how Hoshin Kanri can directly help your continuous improvement efforts. Any continuous improvement approach runs the risk of operating in isolation. However, you can directly align your improvement efforts with a long-term strategic vision.

Speaking of continuous improvement, you might reach the natural limits of a process over time. Don’t worry, there are options when you start seeing diminishing returns. Making use of BPR might be drastic, and will likely throw your organization into chaos for a moment, but its successful use can see massive gains across the board.

Conclusion

A culture based around continuous improvement isn’t just going to benefit the service and customer-facing side of operations, but also your overall security posture. It can be tough to break the old habits of sticking with big-ticket improvements and rolling from there. However, by embracing gradual, incremental change, you can see some profound effects in how your team responds to incidents and remediation in the future.