Category: Governance and Compliance
Security Champions Program
Also known as: SCP, Security Champions, Security Champion Initiative, Embedded Security Champion Program
Simply put
A Security Champions Program designates developers or engineers within product teams to act as local security points of contact, helping spread security awareness and best practices across the organization. These individuals serve as a bridge between their development team and the central security or compliance team. The goal is to reduce overall security risk by influencing organizational behavior without requiring every team to have a dedicated security professional.
Formal definition
A Security Champions Program is an organizational model in which developers or engineers are designated as embedded security subject matter experts (SMEs) within their respective development or product teams. Champions typically monitor adherence to security best practices, facilitate security uplift activities such as threat modeling or capture-the-flag (CTF) exercises, and serve as the primary interface between their team and centralized security and compliance functions. The program operates as a force-multiplier for security teams in environments where dedicated security staff cannot be embedded in every team, distributing security responsibility across the engineering organization to reduce risk at scale.
Why it matters
Application security teams are typically small relative to the engineering organizations they support, making it impractical to embed a dedicated security professional in every development or product team. A Security Champions Program addresses this coverage gap by distributing security responsibility across the engineering organization, allowing security knowledge and awareness to scale without a proportional increase in centralized security headcount. This force-multiplier model means security considerations can be raised and addressed earlier in the development lifecycle, at the team level, rather than being deferred to a centralized review process that may occur too late to be cost-effective.
Who it's relevant to
Application Security Teams
Security teams operating in organizations with large or growing engineering functions often cannot provide dedicated coverage to every product team. A Security Champions Program allows centralized security staff to extend their reach by working through designated champions, making it a practical governance model for scaling security oversight without proportional headcount growth.
Software Developers and Engineers
Developers who take on a champion role gain deeper exposure to security practices, threat modeling, and secure coding standards. Those who are not champions benefit from having a local peer who can answer security questions and advocate for security considerations within sprint planning and code review processes, rather than relying solely on external security reviews.
Engineering Managers and Team Leads
Managers benefit from having a recognized security point of contact within their team who can help triage security findings, coordinate with compliance functions, and ensure the team is aware of relevant security requirements. This reduces the friction of engaging with centralized security teams and helps integrate security into normal development workflows.
CISOs and Security Program Leaders
For security leadership, a Security Champions Program is an organizational strategy for influencing engineering behavior at scale. It supports a shift-left approach by embedding security awareness closer to where development decisions are made, and provides a structured channel for communicating security priorities, policy changes, and emerging risks across a distributed engineering organization.
Compliance and Risk Functions
Compliance teams benefit from having identifiable contacts within development teams who understand security requirements and can help ensure controls are implemented correctly. Champions can serve as a practical liaison for compliance activities, reducing the effort required to gather evidence or communicate regulatory and policy expectations to engineering teams.
Inside SCP
Champion Selection and Nomination
The process of identifying and recruiting developers, engineers, or other technical staff to serve as security advocates within their teams, typically through voluntary participation or peer nomination rather than top-down assignment.
Security Training and Enablement
Structured education provided to champions covering secure coding practices, common vulnerability classes, threat modeling basics, and the organization's specific security standards, equipping them to advise teammates and review work with a security lens.
Community of Practice
A recurring forum, channel, or meeting cadence that connects all security champions across the organization, facilitating knowledge sharing, discussion of emerging threats, and coordination on cross-team security initiatives.
Defined Roles and Responsibilities
A documented charter outlining what is expected of a champion, such as participating in threat modeling sessions, conducting lightweight security reviews, triaging vulnerability reports for their team, and acting as a liaison to the central security team.
Metrics and Recognition
Mechanisms for tracking champion activity and impact, and for formally recognizing contributions through career development credit, public acknowledgment, or incentive programs, sustaining motivation and program participation over time.
Escalation Pathways
Clearly defined channels and procedures through which champions can escalate security questions, incidents, or findings to the central security team, ensuring issues that exceed a champion's scope receive appropriate expert attention.
Tooling and Resource Access
Provision of security tools, reference materials, playbooks, and threat intelligence feeds that champions can use directly within their teams, reducing friction in applying security controls during development.
Common questions
Answers to the questions practitioners most commonly ask about SCP.
Does having Security Champions mean we no longer need a dedicated security team?
No. Security Champions are embedded within development teams to provide localized security awareness, triage, and advocacy, but they are not a replacement for dedicated security professionals. Security Champions typically lack the depth of expertise required for advanced threat modeling, penetration testing, incident response, and security architecture decisions. The program is designed to scale the reach of the central security team, not to eliminate it.
Are Security Champions responsible for the security of their team's code?
Not in a formal accountability sense. Security Champions serve as a resource and a point of contact for security concerns within their team, but ultimate security accountability typically remains with engineering leads, product owners, and the security organization. Placing formal security liability on Champions risks role confusion, burnout, and attrition from the program.
How should organizations select Security Champions from their development teams?
Selection should prioritize genuine interest in security over seniority or management assignment. Effective Champions are typically volunteers or individuals who have already demonstrated curiosity about security topics. Organizations may use self-nomination, peer nomination, or identification through security training engagement. Assigning the role without buy-in commonly results in low participation and limited program effectiveness.
How much time should Security Champions be expected to dedicate to the role?
This varies by organization size and program maturity, but most programs allocate somewhere between five and twenty percent of a Champion's working time to security-related activities. Organizations should negotiate this allocation explicitly with engineering managers, as undocumented time expectations are a common cause of Champion disengagement. The time commitment should be reflected in capacity planning.
What training and support should Security Champions receive to be effective?
Champions should receive foundational security training relevant to their technology stack, access to the central security team for escalation and guidance, and ongoing education through regular touchpoints such as community of practice meetings or threat briefings. Without structured support, Champions may plateau in their knowledge, provide inconsistent guidance, or lose motivation to continue in the role.
How should organizations measure whether a Security Champions Program is working?
Effective measurement typically combines leading and lagging indicators. Leading indicators may include training completion rates, Champion participation in security activities such as threat modeling or code review, and the volume of security issues raised through Champions. Lagging indicators may include reduction in vulnerabilities found late in the development cycle or improvements in security-related findings during audits. Organizations should avoid relying solely on headcount as a proxy for program health.
Common misconceptions
Security champions replace or reduce the need for a dedicated security team.
Security champions extend the reach of the central security team into individual development teams but do not substitute for security professionals. Champions typically handle first-level guidance and lightweight review, while the central team retains responsibility for deep assessments, policy, architecture review, and incident response.
Any volunteer who expresses interest is immediately effective as a security champion.
Effectiveness requires ongoing training, access to appropriate resources, and organizational support. Without a structured enablement program and clear responsibilities, champions may lack the knowledge or authority to meaningfully improve security outcomes within their teams.
A security champions program produces uniform security maturity across all teams once launched.
Champion programs typically produce uneven results across teams, depending on individual champion engagement, team culture, workload, and management support. Sustained improvement requires active program management, consistent community engagement, and periodic reassessment of champion participation and coverage.
Best practices
Define a written charter for the program before recruiting champions, specifying time commitments, responsibilities, escalation paths, and how the role interacts with the central security team, so candidates can make informed decisions about participation.
Establish a recurring community of practice meeting or dedicated communication channel so that champions can share knowledge, surface common problems, and maintain engagement with each other and the security team over time.
Provide champions with role-appropriate training that is specific to the technologies and risk context of their teams, rather than generic security awareness content, so that guidance they give is directly applicable to their colleagues' day-to-day work.
Integrate champion contributions into existing performance and career development frameworks, ensuring that participation is recognized by management and carries tangible professional value rather than being treated as purely voluntary additional work.
Track program health through measurable indicators such as active champion count, coverage across teams, escalations initiated, and participation in security activities, and use that data to identify gaps and adjust program support accordingly.
Rotate or refresh the champion roster periodically to prevent burnout, incorporate new perspectives, and expand the base of staff with security awareness across the organization.