This blog post complements our guide on What is Application Security? by diving deep into the organizational foundations required to build a successful AppSec program.
Picture this: You’ve just invested in the latest, most sophisticated application security platform. It promises to scan your code, detect vulnerabilities, and protect your applications. You roll it out across the organization, and… nothing happens. Developers ignore the alerts. Security findings pile up unaddressed. The expensive tool sits there, generating reports that nobody reads.
Sound familiar? This scenario plays out in organizations everywhere, and it’s not because the tools are bad, but because they’re solving the wrong problem first.
The reality is that application security is fundamentally a human and organizational challenge, not just a technical one. According to the Orca 2025 State of Cloud Security Report, 85% of organizations have plaintext secrets embedded in their source code repositories. Technology can detect these problems, but only people and processes can prevent them.
This is why the most successful AppSec programs follow a simple but often overlooked framework: People → Process → Technology. Get the organizational foundation right first, and technology becomes a powerful amplifier. Skip the foundation, and you’re just automating chaos.
Part 1: People: Finding Your Security Champions
Every great security program starts with people. Not policies, not tools, not compliance frameworks, people. Specifically, you need to find and empower the right people who can bridge the gap between your security team and your development teams.
In large organizations, this is a scaling problem. You might have 5-10 security engineers trying to support 200+ developers across dozens of teams. Traditional approaches like mandatory security reviews, centralized gates, or generic training create bottlenecks. Developers start seeing security as a blocker. Your security team becomes overwhelmed. Nothing scales.
This is where Security Champions programs shine. Instead of security being an external force that developers have to work around, it becomes embedded within each team through a trusted peer who understands both security principles and the team’s specific context.
The Magic of Champions
Think about it: When a security engineer you’ve never met tells you to fix something, it feels like an edict from on high. But when Sarah from your team, who understands your codebase, your deadlines, and your constraints, says “hey, we should probably address this security issue,” you listen. That’s the power of proximity and credibility.
Security Champions are developers who volunteer to become security advocates for their teams. They receive additional training and support from the security team, but they remain embedded in their development teams. This dual identity is what makes them effective: they speak the language of developers while understanding security principles.
The benefits are immediate. Champions translate abstract security requirements into concrete, actionable guidance for their teams. They answer questions immediately instead of routing them through a security team queue. They catch issues earlier because they’re reviewing code with security in mind. Most importantly, they make security feel less like compliance and more like good engineering practice.
Building Your Program
Starting a Security Champions program doesn’t require a massive investment. Begin with a pilot: identify 5-10 developers across different teams who already show interest in security. Look for people who ask security questions in meetings, catch issues in code reviews, or have completed security training. Make it voluntary, as you want genuine interest, not reluctant volunteers.
Provide foundational security training tailored to application security, not generic awareness. Focus on practical knowledge they can immediately apply. Give them hands-on experience with your security tools so they can help their teams use them effectively. Create a community, things like a dedicated Slack channel, regular meetings, a knowledge base, etc. where champions can share learnings and support each other.
Recognition matters. Publicly acknowledge champions for their contributions. Provide career development opportunities like security certifications or conference attendance. Consider formalizing the role in job descriptions. Make it something people want to be part of.
The key is to start small, learn what works in your organization, and scale gradually. For comprehensive guidance on building and scaling a Security Champions program, the Security Champion Program Success Guide provides a detailed framework covering everything from vision to continuous improvement.
Beyond your champions, you need to build security awareness across all development teams. This means role-based training, secure coding workshops, and making security part of onboarding. But your champions become the force multipliers due to how they disseminate information, answer questions, and make security feel accessible rather than intimidating.
Part 2: Process: Making Security Part of the Workflow
Once you have the right people in place, you need processes that make security a natural part of how work gets done, not a separate activity that happens after the fact.
Policies That Actually Work
Every organization needs an Application Security policy, but most policies are terrible. They’re either so vague they’re meaningless (“developers should write secure code”) or so prescriptive they’re impossible to follow. The best policies strike a balance: they’re comprehensive enough to provide clear guidance, but flexible enough to accommodate different teams and contexts.
Start with industry standards like OWASP guidelines or NIST frameworks, then adapt them to your organization. Involve stakeholders, such as developers, product managers, business leaders, in policy development. If developers don’t understand or agree with a policy, they’ll find ways around it.
Your policy should cover the essentials: secure coding standards, authentication and authorization requirements, data protection standards, dependency management, and how security integrates into your SDLC. But it should also be actionable. Instead of saying “use secure coding practices,” specify which OWASP Top 10 items to address and how.
Procedures That Enable, Not Block
Policies define what needs to be done; procedures define how. Well-defined procedures ensure consistency and efficiency. They answer questions like: When do we run security scans? How do we prioritize findings? What’s the workflow for addressing vulnerabilities? Who approves security exceptions?
The trick is making these procedures feel like part of the development workflow, not separate security gates. This is where “shift-left” becomes real. Security checks should happen automatically in your CI/CD pipeline. Security findings should appear in pull requests, not in separate reports. Remediation workflows should integrate with your issue tracking system.
Think about it from a developer’s perspective: If they have to leave their IDE, go to a separate security dashboard, figure out what the finding means, then manually create a ticket, you’ve created friction. But if a security finding appears as a comment on their PR with clear remediation steps, and they can fix it and push a new commit that automatically re-tests, security becomes seamless.
Integration Is Everything
The most successful AppSec programs integrate security into every tool developers already use. Secrets detection runs automatically on commits. Code scanning happens on every pull request. Dependency scanning is part of the build process. Container scanning happens before images are pushed to registries.
This integration extends beyond just CI/CD. Security findings should appear in IDEs, code review tools, issue trackers, and communication platforms. The goal is to make security visible and actionable in the context where developers are already working, not in a separate security tool they have to remember to check.
Measuring What Matters
You can’t improve what you don’t measure, but you also can’t measure everything. Start with metrics that actually matter: How many vulnerabilities are we finding and fixing? How quickly are we detecting and remediating issues? What’s our security test coverage? Are developers engaging with security processes?
Avoid metrics that incentivize wrong behaviors. Measuring “number of vulnerabilities found” might encourage finding more vulnerabilities rather than preventing them. Instead, measure “vulnerabilities fixed” or “time to remediate.” Make metrics visible through dashboards, but use them to identify improvement opportunities, not to punish teams.
Part 3: Technology: Amplifying Your Foundation
Only after you’ve established the people and process foundations should technology become your focus. At this point, technology becomes a powerful force multiplier, automating what your champions and processes have already made part of the culture.
The Right Tools for the Job
A comprehensive AppSec toolset needs to cover the full spectrum: static analysis to find vulnerabilities in code, dependency scanning to identify vulnerable libraries, infrastructure-as-code security to catch misconfigurations before deployment, container scanning for image vulnerabilities, and secrets detection to prevent exposed credentials.
But here’s the thing, these tools are only effective if they integrate seamlessly into developer workflows. Developers shouldn’t have to learn new tools or change their processes. Security should appear where they’re already working: in their IDEs, in their pull requests, in their CI/CD pipelines.
How Orca Security Fits In
The Orca Cloud Security Platform is designed to support the organizational approach we’ve been discussing. It doesn’t just provide security tools, it amplifies the people and processes you’ve already established.
For your Security Champions, Orca provides clear, actionable findings that are easy to understand and communicate. When a champion needs to explain a security issue to their team, they get detailed, prioritized information with remediation guidance. Orca’s code origin tracing helps champions quickly identify where issues originate, making remediation faster and more efficient.
For your processes, Orca’s customizable guardrail policies align with your AppSec policies, automatically enforcing security requirements. Deep integrations with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, Jenkins, and other tools ensure security fits naturally into existing workflows. Automated scanning supports your security testing procedures, while remediation tracking supports your vulnerability management workflows.
What makes Orca unique is its ability to connect runtime security risks in your cloud environment back to their origins in your code. This Cloud-to-Dev tracing is game-changing. Instead of just detecting a misconfiguration in production, you can trace it back to the specific code commit that introduced it. This enables teams to fix issues at their origin rather than applying band-aids in production.
Orca provides comprehensive coverage across the application security spectrum: SAST for code vulnerabilities, SCA for dependency issues, IaC security for infrastructure misconfigurations, container security, secrets detection, and SCM posture management. But it’s all unified in a single platform, reducing tool sprawl and providing comprehensive visibility from code to cloud.
The developer experience matters too. Security findings appear directly in developer environments. Automated security feedback shows up in pull requests. Security checks happen automatically without disrupting workflows. Every finding comes with actionable guidance, not just a problem statement.
Bringing It All Together
Building an effective AppSec program is a journey, not a destination. Start with people, finding your champions and building your community. Then establish processes that make security part of the workflow, not a separate activity. Finally, layer in technology that amplifies your efforts.
The organizations that get this right don’t have the most sophisticated tools. They have engaged people, clear processes, and technology that supports both. They’ve made security part of the culture, not a compliance checkbox.
Remember: Technology can detect problems, but only people and processes can prevent them. Start with the foundation, and the tools will follow.
Ready to Build Your AppSec Program?
To learn more about how Orca Security can support your organizational approach to application security, schedule a personalized demo with our team today. We’ll show you how Orca’s comprehensive Application Security capabilities integrate with your people and processes to create a unified security program from code to cloud.
