Keeping applications safe should be a priority for organizations, but getting teams on board with secure coding training is not always easy. At SecureFlag, we believe that everyone in the software development lifecycle needs to learn about secure coding. So, how can organizations encourage teams to join in?
Strategies to Encourage Participation
Below are some examples that organizations can use to increase participation in secure coding training.
Launch With Executive Support
Start the program with support from executive sponsors to show its importance. This will send a positive message to employees that it’s a top priority for the organization, making them want to get on board and take part.
Keep Participants Engaged
Send out exciting updates every month or quarter to keep your participants informed and motivated. Some ideas are to share fresh content, highlight new features, and show progress metrics to keep employees informed and motivated.
To add some fun, include interactive elements like quizzes and trivia—this will make the experience engaging for everyone involved.
Celebrate Achievements
Recognizing achievements during Town Halls, featuring employees on the company intranet, or giving shout-outs in internal emails are all good ideas. Also, make sure to acknowledge the team managers who have high-performing teams.
Offer Rewards
Offering rewards is another way to increase or maintain participation. Rewards like gift cards, collectible items, or even a half-day off can motivate teams and keep them wanting to participate.
Host Competitions
Organize regular competitions, both online and in-person. Think of events like SecureFlag’s Secure Coding Tournaments, which can take place over one to three action-packed days or an entire month dedicated to secure coding. These events will not only make learning enjoyable but also bring a sense of competition to the table.
Align with Career Goals
Incorporate the secure coding training program into annual employee objectives. When employees see that participating in the program can help advance their careers, they’re more likely to engage.
Establish Security Champions within Development Teams
Join a Security Champions program to increase career opportunities. As a participant, an employee can gain crucial technical and soft skills that drive professional growth.
Integrate into the Development Workflow
SecureFlag provides plugins that integrate with tools like Jira, Azure Boards, GitHub, and GitLab, allowing developers to access secure coding training and threat modeling resources directly within their usual development environment.
Who is Secure Coding Training for?
SecureFlag offers training for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle, such as developers, cloud engineers, quality assurance (QA), solution architects, team managers, DevOps, and anyone else who has a part to play in building applications.
When looking at security in the context of software development teams in organizations, every role has an impact, either through initial coding or reviewing changes and implementations.
The Benefits of Secure Code Training
Now, look at a different perspective. When managers or team leads say that everyone is being enrolled in mandatory training, it’s not a statement that usually draws excitement. However, every part of the organization stands to gain from taking part in secure code training, but let’s start by looking at what individual employees gain.
Employees
With secure coding training, the benefits to individual employees are huge and not to be overstated:
Recognition
Firstly, taking part in a secure coding training course supplied by organizations comes with the opportunity to perform and be recognized for performance. Most training platforms will come loaded with metric measurements and reporting tools, which might make some participants feel like they are being monitored. However, these are also in place to help identify high performers.
Security Champion
Gaining more knowledge and experience in reviewing and correcting security vulnerabilities and addressing insecure code will put employees leaps and bounds ahead of other developers, setting them apart as security experts in organizations.
Career Advancement
Everyone likes to continue learning, be it through gaining certificates, new qualifications, or by learning through experience with the ever-growing needs of the tech industry. With a training platform, employees are given the tools to demonstrate their commitment to advancing their knowledge. Increase their chances of advancing their career with new skills to showcase on their resumes.
Rewards
Employee efforts to continue learning are commendable and worth showing off; while new knowledge is a reward in itself, having something else to show for it is always welcome.
At SecureFlag, we encourage organizations to use a secure coding training platform to implement training programs that reward users for participation. We also pair organizations with customer service to collaborate and offer rewards for programs!
The Team Manager
Team managers may want to know how secure coding training will benefit the team rather than just one person. Well, newly acquired skills aren’t just a massive boon for one person alone. Team members looking to set themselves apart with training become a resource for teams. Let’s break down how training impacts development teams:
Subject Matter Experts
Suppose team members are committed to learning more about security practices in coding. In that case, they will gain knowledge that can be used for security-related questions and guidance, taking workloads off security teams and creating subject matter experts within the team at the same time.
Developer Retention
No employee likes to feel stagnant. With so many topics to learn and skills to improve, every developer (and employee) feels the same. Offering useful training that is purposeful, immediately relevant, and serves both their individual ambitions of growth and your team’s goals is a win-win. It improves employee satisfaction in their jobs and retention, reducing the amount of retraining for new staff.
The Organization
Benefits aren’t limited to developers and their teams. They impact the organization as a whole.
Reduced Vulnerabilities
Implementing a secure coding program into the software development process will, in turn, foster a safe culture where fewer vulnerabilities are introduced into the codebase. How? By making developers aware of security issues before they have a chance to manifest in the application itself. A lot of security vulnerabilities appear due to a lack of developer awareness of what they look like. With robust training, this is addressed and prevented.
Less Security Rework
Following on from reducing the number of introduced vulnerabilities, where the obvious benefit is no risk from data disclosure or a security breach, reduced rework is a pleasant side effect. With a reduced number of vulnerabilities, there is more time to spend on building the product according to the projected roadmap.
Reduced Time-to-Fix
When unfortunate occurrences happen where vulnerabilities are discovered in the code base, your development teams are already well-versed in how to remediate vulnerabilities, meaning that the total time to fix them is drastically reduced.
Compliance Regulations
Standards such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) require a level of training to be delivered to developers and staff. This is necessary for those developing systems interacting with electronic protected health information (ePHI) and payment data. Implementing a secure coding training program is a great way of achieving compliance.
What sets SecureFlag apart?
As we have alluded to throughout this post, SecureFlag isn’t just another standard training platform that asks you to read a question and select an answer; we decided to be different by immersing users in labs that simulate a real development environment.
What our platform does that’s different is recognize that developers perform, learn, and retain more information when they are in a familiar coding environment. With SecureFlag, you can:
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Prepare vulnerable environments within virtualized labs, allowing users and organizations to freely play with and resolve software vulnerabilities without the fear of introducing costly harm to a production environment.
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Enable users to interact with and perform tasks within their browsers in our platform, meaning deploying our tools is virtually instantaneous without any extra issues arising from introducing new tools to the development pipeline.
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Offer a large catalog of programming languages, frameworks, and technologies. If your team uses a specific tech stack, we probably have it. Check out our Lab Catalog to see for yourself!
Get in touch with our team today to learn more about SecureFlag and how it can benefit your organization.
