Why Application Teams Have All the Power

The Doppler Cloud Podcast

Our guests on the podcast this week are Jeff Westphal, technical director, and Bill McGee, general manager of the Hybrid Cloud Security Group, at IT security company Trend Micro. Over the past 10 years, the power structure has shifted inside IT organizations. Maintaining the infrastructure used to be the top priority, so infrastructure teams tended to control more resources and command more respect than their counterparts overseeing applications. Today, that equation has flipped. Businesses need to move faster, so they’ve elevated application teams to star status. We discuss the implications of this power shift. Instead of reacting, app teams now are dictating the requirements of organizational initiatives – choosing resources, deciding which platforms they want to use. This has forced organizations to approach security differently and get used to technologies like containers. We also talk about mistakes organizations make when it comes to cloud security – including relying too much on the cloud vendor and forcing an on-premise security tool do the same thing in the cloud. Finally, we explore some guiding principles organizations use to help development and security teams work better together – to show how security isn’t the enemy of progress.