As code shifts to accommodate customer mandates, regulatory and compliance needs, and technical security requirements, security can finally keep pace with development using some of the same tools. How can you take a more dynamic approach to application security? Let’s look at four ways cloud-native applications evolve and how IaC enables security to keep up.

1. Changes to business requirements

An application might start out simply as proof of value, and at that stage, it likely doesn’t deal with any sensitive business data. When the application evolves into a pilot for customers and starts dealing with sensitive data, priorities need to change. At that point, you’re dealing with new security requirements and you may have to meet different regulatory and compliance needs or certain internal best practices. Customer needs and business opportunities will continue to evolve and applications will follow suit.

With IaC, those changes can be accounted for with minimal coding and scaled across the application environment with security reference architectures and design patterns that address customer mandates, regulatory and compliance needs, and technical security requirements.

2. Updated technology requirements

Organizations often change their architectures from release to release and sprint to sprint. If a customer requires an analytics service, developers can easily integrate one. But that kind of addition is a foundational change to the application architecture and the capabilities the application provides.

The need for new capabilities, changes in strategy, and customer feedback can all necessitate changes to the service or product, which requires updating the application architecture. The assumptions from every previous security assessment may no longer apply. This allows you to automatically assess changes to the architecture against your security reference architectures and design patterns to more quickly identify security and compliance gaps. From there, any discrepancies are fed back into the pipeline.

3. New security requirements

With the growth of cloud-based security threats, new recommendations are constantly updated, which requires flexibility. But it’s not just best practices. New security threats, new compliance and regulatory needs, and customer requirements all feed changes in your application architecture.

Depending on the customer and the nature of their business, they might require more stringent security requirements than were initially built into the application. Every security update, even as it guards against particular vulnerabilities, can introduce new security issues as application architectures shift. The automated visibility into every change that IaC offers helps security teams keep an eye on the implications of each update across the entire application architecture.

4. Updates to cloud features

AWS and Azure update features and capabilities on a daily basis. As consumers of those capabilities, developers and security engineers understandably have a tough time keeping up with the massive churn of new features. But they’re still useful.

A developer might adopt a specific capability or feature that is new and still has some security gaps, but that’s an acceptable risk since AWS and Azure will fix the issue later on. Three months later, when Azure releases a new update, how do you make sure the application architecture is being updated now that the new security capability is available? The automation made possible by IaC allows for instant updates once new, more secure versions of cloud tools are released.

Just as developers have found new velocity with IaC, security also needs a more dynamic approach. That way security never slows down developers and developers never have to bypass security. They can advance together, at speed and scale.

There are lots of ways to do more with your company’s resources. 

You can hire the best talent, you can improve engagement, or reduce interruptions. There are always opportunities to minimize meetings, promote psychological safety, and even redesign your office space to boost productive hours.

You can also move to the cloud. 

In fact, nearly 80% of IT professionals say moving to the cloud improved their productivity, according to research by Office 365. And employees who use cloud apps and remote access are 13% more productive than their peers. So, if you want to increase productivity, a move to the cloud is a good start. And since low productivity costs companies $7 trillion annually, that move is likely to yield more than just a few more on-time project launches.

Cloud shortens IT teams’ to-do list

With on-premise setups, IT teams are responsible for a long list of tasks, from server setup and parts replacement to handling major incidents and keeping up with the latest in security. With the cloud, you outsource many of those tasks to your vendor, freeing up your IT team to focus on the highest-value tasks for your business.

As Igloo’s Senior Tools Admin James Seddon explains:

” Since we moved to cloud, our internal IT tickets have been cut by 50%. Instead of dealing with bugs or admin requests, I’m mostly hearing about new apps and features our users want to add, ultimately helping them do their jobs better and providing more value to our customers.”

Airbnb’s VP of Engineering shared a similar sentiment in an interview on their architecture:

“It is important for our engineers to focus as much as possible on the things that are unique to our business, not running a ton of infrastructure.”

As a bonus, migrating also impacts how you hire, shortening the list of must-have skills for the IT team and freeing you to hire people who have deep expertise instead of broad, shallow skill sets.

Cloud prioritizes focus and expertise

Reducing the number of tasks on your IT team’s list isn’t just about freeing up time. It’s also about freeing up mental space – a more subtle consideration that has a big impact on productivity.

In other words: the more tasks on your IT team’s list, the less likely they are to do them all well. In fact, error rates rise by 50% when we try to take on too many things at once. Workers with long to-do lists report elevated stress levels. And multitasking harms not only performance but also long-term brain health and IQ.

So, when we say that most IT teams are overburdened and constantly switching tasks, we’re also saying those teams are far less likely to be productive, creative, and strategic than their more focused counterparts. Removing the need for expertise in load balancers, server room climate control systems, and the latest security updates is one way to lift the mental burden and foster a more focused, more productive team.

Cloud unburdens your non-technical teams too

It’s easy to assume that all those time savings only benefit IT teams, but cloud tools offer productivity benefits for every team – from marketing to HR to sales and beyond.

One of the core reasons for this is automation. Automating workflows, documentation, and basic tasks not only shortens employee to-do lists, but also frees up that elusive, valuable mental space, reduces multitasking, and lets people focus on their strengths.

This shifts the focus to more important work tasks and directly impacts employee happiness, productivity, retention, and engagement. Because according to Gallup, people who use their strengths daily are six times more likely to be satisfied at work.  They’re also 8% more productive and 15% less likely to quit.

Another way the cloud makes non-technical people more productive? 

Cloud tools tend to release small, regularly paced updates. This means that, instead of having to train teams on a long list of new features two or three times a year, they get a series of much smaller changes more regularly. And since incremental changes are more likely to stick than big ones, the learning curve feels less daunting. It also means teams have access to the latest features and security the moment they’re available, so they can take full advantage of every new benefit.

Cloud makes remote and distributed teams more efficient

Remote and distributed teams are the future, which is probably why more companies embrace them every year, hiring the best talent for high-skilled positions no matter whether that talent lives in Toledo, Ohio, or Toledo, Spain.

And as remote work and distributed teams grow, so too does our need for tools that connect us; tools that encourage open communication, allow teams to collaborate in real-time without being in the same physical space and give admins a bird’s-eye view of everything going on with their teams.

It’s no longer good enough to rely on the complex dance of self-hosted VPNs and virtual machines and data that’s only accessible on-site – at least not if you want to be a competitive workplace. After all, employees are 50% less likely to quit when you allow them to work from home, and 58% of employees say remote work has made them more satisfied with their jobs.

Cloud fosters collaboration

Whether your teams work in a single office or all around the globe, 87% of leaders say the cloud is a breakthrough for collaboration – and every study we’ve read agrees. Collaboration drives perseverance, engagement, productivity, and high performance. And collaborative companies are five times as likely to be high performing than their siloed peers.

With on-prem setups, a collaboration between teams is complicated at best. Files, data, and documentation are often stored in silos. Teams have little visibility into what other teams are doing. And tracking down documentation is often a physical act of walking to another floor and seeking out the person responsible for it.

With the cloud, collaboration is built-in. Teams can comment on documents in real-time (and at the same time). They have easy access to documentation and data, as long as they have the right permissions. This cross-team transparency is paramount to unleashing the potential of teams and is baked into all of Atlassian’s cloud products.