Integrating Security Into Development With Neil Drennan

05/05/20 • 25 min

Many banks are still running on decades-old sets of legacy technologies, but the security and performance advantages cloud-native systems offer is changing that. Today, we’re going into the future of banking technology with Neil Drennan, CTO at 10x Future Technologies. His firm is building the first cloud-native banking platform that can be used by large-scale banks in order to solve the cost and security related problems caused by their legacy systems. Neil fills listeners in about his role in the overall mission at 10x before diving right into the topic of how they integrate security into their development practices. Often security and development teams find it difficult to integrate into each other because they are kept in separate silos from the outset. Things are different at 10x though as Neil explains, talking about the back and forth conversations between his different teams and their use of vulnerability dashboards to keep things transparent. Neil weighs in on the necessity for 10x to get security right, but the benefits of working with banks as clients because of their high level of insight into potential threats. We hear all sorts of amazing improvements for threat monitoring that cloud-native solutions can provide, making the legacy moat model look outdated indeed. A key takeaway from Neil today is the importance of building security into development from the ground up, so tune in to hear how he manages best practices at 10x.

10x is looking for more talent to join its team with roles in the UK in London and Leeds. You can see their latest roles here

Show notes and transcript can be found here

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10x is looking for more talent to join its team with roles in the UK in London and Leeds. You can see their latest roles here

Show notes and transcript can be found here

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Previous Episode

Why We Need To Share Seth Vargo’s Serverless Secret

On today’s episode, Guy Podjarny, President and cofounder of Snyk, talks to Seth Vargo at DevSecCon Seattle. Seth previously worked at HashiCorp, Chef Software, CustomInk, and a few Pittsburgh-based startups. He is the author of Learning Chef and is passionate about reducing inequality in technology. Today, he is now a developer advocate at Google and is passionate about the human element of security. This discussion is centered around the talk Seth gave at DevSecCon Seattle titled, Secrets in Serverless. In this episode, we flesh out one of the core principles of this talk which is that security is not binary. Here we explore the often-unseen side of security and how developers can prevent or limit attacks by assuming from the get-go that their secrets will be leaked! If you’re looking for practical, in-depth advice, as well as a leading, expert strategy that will shift your view on managing secrets in serverless – then this is the episode for you!

Show notes and transcript can be found here

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Next Episode

Advocating For The Securability Measure With Shannon Lietz

In episode 58 of The Secure Developer, Guy Podjarny talks to Shannon Lietz, DevSecOps Leader and Director at Intuit. Shannon is a multi-award winning leader and security innovation visionary with 20 years of experience in motivating high performance teams.

Today on The Secure Developer, we interview Shannon Lietz from Intuit. She is a multi-award winning leader and security innovation visionary with 20 years of experience in motivating high-performance teams. Her accolades include winning the Scott Cook Innovation Award in 2014 for developing a new cloud security program to protect sensitive data in AWS. She has a development, security, and operations background, working for several Fortune 500 companies. Currently, she is at Intuit where she leads a team of DevSecOps engineers. In this episode, she talks about the future of security and the progress the industry has made in closing the vulnerability gaps by, inter alia, maintaining continuous testing, ongoing production, and building sufficient capability within teams to know a good test from a bad one. But the problem is a long way from solved, and she shares with enthusiasm about the new buzzword called “securability” and how this measure can be standardized to uplift the security industry as a whole.

Transcript

[0:01:27.9] Guy Podjarny: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to The Secure Developer. Thanks for tuning in. Today, we have really maybe one of the originators, the pioneers of DevSecOps with us and really a bright security mind in Shannon Lietz from Intuit. Thank for coming out to the show, Shannon.

[0:01:42.2] Shannon Lietz: Super excited to be here. I love this show.

[0:01:46.4] Guy Podjarny: Shannon, we have a whole bunch of topics to cover. Before we dig in, tell us a little bit about yourself. What is it you do? How you got into security?

[0:01:53.5] Shannon Lietz: Awesome. Yeah, I've been in this industry for over 30 years and that makes me a dinosaur, as I always say. I feel the placement journey on an ad is to really try and help the industry and take some of the lessons I've learned over that long career and really try to make a change.

My goal at this point is really to make a dent in the security problem as a goal for my life and my career.

As part of it, I got into this basically with lots of curiosity and didn't even realize it was a mostly male journey. Nobody told me when I decided that computers were fun. I learned through lots of hard knocks, but basically this wasn't a path carved out for women. I thought, “You know what? The heck with it. I always do things that people tell me I shouldn't be doing.” I started out with computers at a really young age and eventually, learned how to do some really neat things that again, shouldn't have been done.

At the time, they called it hacking. I thought, “Well, you know what? I want to be a hacker, so cool.” Then eventually, it became illegal and I was like, “Okay, that's not a job.” My dad was horrified by the fact that this could be a problem. Eventually, it turned into actually it was a job. You just had to do it a certain way. That was the beginning. I mean, when I started in computers, nothing was really illegal per se. The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act was interesting and that shaped some of this industry.

Along the way, there's lots of trials and tribulations. Yeah, I started there and I've been a developer, so I've written code. I'm so sorry to anybody who's still maintaining my code, God forbid. Then as you look back on 30 years, you’re like, “Wow, I could have done a lot of better things.”

Then I got into the security and I've even done ops. I always said that if I needed to make money and pay my bills that I would ops for food, and so I ops for food. Then eventually, I smooshed it all together and created a term that some love and some hate and whether – here we are.

[0:03:50.9] Guy Podjarny: Yeah. Definitely has become the terminology of choice, the depth of the – we had a rugged DevOps, we had also some variance, but it's very clear that DevSecOps is the term that emerged.

[0:04:02.0] Shannon Lietz: That's cool, because I've got a new one coming.

[0:04:06.0] Guy Podjarny: We’ve got some great further pioneering here to air on the show. Just a little bit from a companies and industries’ experience and so we don’t completely jumped around, like a whole bunch of things. I think right now, you are at Intuit, right? Before that, you were at ServiceNow?

[0:04:23.9] Shannon Lietz: I was. I was at that wonderful other cloud company. I like cloud companies as they seem to be fun. I was also at Sony before that. I mean, my track record is pretty much financial. I did telco work. I mean, I've had about 22 companies that worked for in this period. I've been at ...