Cloud Native Application Protection Platforms

Chapter 9. Building a CNAPP Culture

We’ve learned a lot, and we’ve come a long way. With a sigh, the fun and games that started in Chapter 1 with an awkward note from MI5 are finally over. The gentle nudge from MI5 that suggested we had been breached had led to a metric ton of new system knowledge, learnings, improvements, and collaboration between all our teams. MI5 was finally off our case, to be hastily replaced by journalists and customers all asking the same question: “How are you going to learn and improve to avoid these problems in the future?”

How were we going to improve how we operated so we deserved their trust again? It was more than a fair question, and the answer came from an unexpected source: the culture that our CNAPP had enabled.

From Slow Culture War to Fast Culture Collaboration

A CNAPP, and platformization in general, represents a collaborative “better together” effort in terms of automation and tooling, as well as among the people and their processes, which can be a challenge.

A CNAPP revolves around the principle that collaboration and effective communication are foundational to the success of teams and organizations. There is ample evidence of this idea, which has been deeply explored in the fields of DevOps, software development, and organizational management. Works by Gene Kim, particularly The Phoenix Project (with Kevin Behr and George Spafford) and The DevOps Handbook (with Jez Humble, Patrick Debois, and John Willis) (both IT Revolution Press, 2013 ...