The Deputy Chief Information Security Officer at Guidewire Software, Akshay Shetty, emphasizes the importance of transparency in cloud product and service providers’ security functions to build trust with customers. Shetty believes that describing security functions from a customer’s perspective can help customers understand their roles in a provider’s shared responsibility model. Shetty has designed a framework for structuring security programs that align with the customer journey when adopting and operationalizing cloud products/services.
The typical customer journey while using a cloud product/service includes awareness, consideration, onboarding, retention, and advocacy. Shetty suggests aligning security activities with these phases of the customer journey to ensure that the security measures are clear and understandable for customers. This includes launching and maintaining a trust page on the company website, providing security walkthroughs, responding to security-related requests promptly, and documenting security best practices for product implementations.
Shetty recommends various security activities for different customer journey phases, such as evaluating security risks during customer engagement, maintaining secure software development lifecycle processes, and participating in private forums to collaborate on collective defense. By incorporating customer empathy into security programs and aligning them with the outlined framework, businesses can better understand their shared security responsibilities and deliver customer success.
Shetty encourages businesses to use the framework to structure their security functions and require third-party vendors to do the same. By adopting this approach, organizations can enhance their understanding of their security responsibilities and build stronger trust relationships with customers. The framework can help businesses effectively describe their security programs to customers in a way that assures them about the security of their data and business operations.
