It helped us in multiple ways. It's easy to present to leadership where they can get the big picture, and they can ask their questions based on what they see in the drawings. Also, it's a good tool in that it drills down and gets down to the actual requirements. Sometimes we can get buried in the risks, but the risks all translate into requirements. The requirements are the meat and potatoes for our developers. To remediate what's needed, the sooner we get them involved and the sooner we are involved in the process, the sooner the results are designed into the solution. We are also able to reuse the work we put in. When we do something once and there is a revision to the same application, we can start with the previous version. It saves a huge amount of time.
It's a time saver. As we've gotten along, we've determined what we've already remediated. We're not going through a huge list that we used to go through in the beginning. We're going through things that only need to be gone through, and it helps maintain the sprints.
ThreatModeler Platform has enabled our company to meet tight delivery dates for the product teams. I've had several instances where things were brought to my attention late in the game. The tool has been excellent in getting in there and getting it done quickly and with less effort. It's a great time saver, so we can get in and get done, and get out. Sometimes we can do it at astounding speed if we have to. It's better to have enough time to get the job done, but when you're under a crunch, you still can get the job done.
We've customized quite a few components to suit our needs. When we have met the requirements, we put standards around a component. We then deploy it and mark it such that the component is remediated by control or by some standards. In that circumstance, the security requirements don't flow through. They're marked as already met, so it saves us a great deal of time. It's very customizable.
I found that not all of our security architects are fluent in each and every cloud. We're supporting all the major clouds and some SaaS environments. We're finding ways to use the tool and expanding it beyond just the typical clouds that we have today. It has allowed an AWS expert to work on a Google Cloud platform and apply their knowledge quickly and faster, and learn those platforms without necessarily having to be certified in every platform.
ThreatModeler has reduced the hours needed to complete threat modeling projects or secure an app in our organization. It takes about a third of the time doing it through ThreatModeler than it would otherwise. It would greatly vary depending on the actual individual person and how developed our standards are. The company I worked at prior did not have ThreatModeler, and I knew what it took to get the same functionality or similar functionality. It took much longer, and it would be much less uniform across.
Initially, we had ten people working on threat models. Today, within our organization, we probably have four. Fewer folks are working on ThreatModeler, and other security architects are being dedicated to specific environments and specific domains. It has allowed us to be more specialized because we need fewer people to do threat modeling.