The CISO’s paradox: Enabling innovation while managing risk

We can keep it real here. One of the main jobs CISOs have is to stop being the “Department of No.” We have to figure out how to enable the rapid delivery of products and services for the business without introducing risks to the same business.

That’s the paradox in a nutshell. In an environment where product teams must constantly test new technologies and ship updates at record speed, traditional end-of-line audits wouldn’t keep up. Security has to move upstream. It must be built into everyday operations, with proactive, actionable measures that empower innovation instead of slowing it down.

CISOs, then, must work more closely with teams from the initial stages to establish clear and practical risk tolerances and build security into development workflows.

Partner early to shape outcomes

CISOs don’t get leverage by showing up at the finish line. They must ditch the gatekeeper mindset and become true partners from Day Zero. In the past, when security measures were only brought in at the final stage, decision-makers were left with a difficult choice: accept project delays or face unmitigated risks. When product cycles were quarterly and speed did not determine competition, this approach made sense. In today’s reality with AI-driven product development, such a process breaks in an environment now made up of weekly sprints, continuous delivery and vendor-driven dependencies.

When security understands revenue goals, customer promises and regulatory exposure, guidance becomes specific and enabling. Begin by embedding a security liaison with each product squad so there is always a known face to engage in identity, data flows, logging and encryption decisions as they form. We should not want to see engineers opening two-week tickets for a simple question. There should be open “office hours,” chat channels and quick calls so they can get immediate feedback on decisions like API design, encryption requirements and regional data moves.

Bureaucracy must be deprecated in our environment. Show up at sprint planning and early design reviews to ask the questions that matter — authentication paths, least-privilege access, logging coverage and how changes will be monitored in production through SIEM and EDR. When security officers sit at the same table, the conversation changes from “Can we do this?” to “How do we do this securely?” and better outcomes follow from day one.

Set risk tolerances and guardrails

Teams slow down when they are unsure how to proceed. Take away some of the decision-making and ensure an integration of authentication, authorization and accounting into the development process. For authentication, establish and leverage enterprise identity management solutions rather than allowing the development of accounts written to databases that can be easily compromised. CISOs must also ensure they define standard role-based access control levels that ensure clear separation of duties is in place in the solution design. For accounting, don’t just create logs; ensure high-cardinality data is being captured for anomaly detection and this data is being integrated into a central security operations center for threat detection and response. Product development teams should not be tasked with security operations responsibilities; other teams should maintain the eye-on-glass visibility into the threats facing the solutions in production.

CISOs must define the organization’s risk appetite in business language that removes ambiguity. Specify which third-party profiles require deep assessment and which can run as bounded pilots with compensating controls. State which vulnerability severities must block a merge and which can proceed with a time-bound remediation plan. Clarify what data classifications may cross regions and what protections must travel with them.

Then translate those choices into automation. Bake guardrails into CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code so enforcement is consistent and visible. Scan each code commit for vulnerabilities, and if a change breaches a critical policy, the build fails with a clear reason and a path to resolution. If it sits within tolerance, it moves forward without manual intervention. The result is governance as an accelerator: predictable, transparent and aligned with how design engineers work.

Build secure-by-design into fast developer lifecycles

When developers deploy code multiple times a day, a “final security review” before launch just wouldn’t work. This traditional, end-of-line gating model doesn’t just block innovation but also fails to catch real-world risks. To be effective, security must be embedded during development, not just inspected after.

If the secure path is harder than the insecure path, developers will choose the easy way every single time. Our job isn’t to hand out a 50-page PDF; it’s to bake security right into their developer environment, giving them pre-vetted, hardened templates that are secure by default. This means offering standard service templates with authentication and authorization already built in. When the secure component is easier to use than the insecure alternative, developers can adopt it easily and will adopt it every time.

Automation is the enforcement layer for this strategy. When security tools are integrated directly into the CI/CD pipeline, feedback becomes available almost in real-time. This allows the team to “fail fast” on critical risks while providing actionable fixes.

This discipline must further extend into production. Even with world-class DevSecOps, we know a zero-day or configuration drift can happen. That’s why we rely on over-arching web application shielding solutions that integrate a robust web application firewall with runtime application attack mitigation and self-protection. These solutions mitigate vulnerabilities and risks in real-time while the application is running in production. They buy the development teams the crucial time they need to resolve the underlying issue without service interruption or breach, ensuring that even if all other controls fail, we have a way to block and tackle in the critical moment.

Runtime telemetry and risk-based alerting are the final checks on this coverage. This promotes a cultural change that enables engineers to take full ownership of their applications, from the initial line of code all the way to production. Security, in turn, achieves thorough, lasting coverage without becoming a bottleneck.

This article is published as part of the Foundry Expert Contributor Network.
Want to join?