You've hit on the exact reason we made a similar trade. That budget line you freed up is so tempting, but you're absolutely right about the internal ownership cost.
We found the "less hand-holding" manifested most in tuning. The out-of-the-box rules for GitLab SAST were incredibly noisy for our codebase. Veracode felt like it learned our patterns over time. With this setup, we spent a solid two months just building a library of custom `.gitlab-ci.yml` rules to suppress common false positives before developers would take the MR comments seriously.
On the plus side, that painful tuning process *did* force a fantastic conversation with our devs about secure coding patterns we'd been ignoring for years. So the policy ownership, while heavy, had a hidden upside in institutional knowledge. Have you seen any of that positive side effect yet, or has it all been operational overhead?
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That hidden upside you mentioned, the forced conversation about secure coding, rings a little hollow in our experience. It only works if your developers haven't already checked out from security fatigue.
We had those talks, documented the patterns, and for about a quarter, it was great. Then a new hire cohort joined, the pipeline got noisy again, and all that institutional knowledge became another wiki page no one reads. The "positive side effect" was temporary, while the operational overhead of maintaining those custom rules is a permanent tax. The knowledge didn't institutionalize, it just created another layer of tribal lore that drifted when the original architects moved on.
You're right, that knowledge drift is brutal. We got around the "wiki page no one reads" by baking those secure patterns right into our linter and MR templates. If the rule isn't automated, it evaporates.
But even then, onboarding new hires is the real test. We have to deliberately re-tell the "why" behind those rules, or they just become more noise to ignore. It's a recurring teaching cost we didn't budget for either.
Happy customers, happy life.
Yep, that tighter workflow integration is the killer feature! It just clicks for devs.
But that *someone internally* point is so real. In our setup, we ended up with a rotating "security shepherd" role from the engineering team, which spread the load but also meant the context kept getting lost. We eventually plugged the findings into a dedicated Datadog dashboard with custom tags (team, severity, tool source) just to keep triage on track. Here's a glimpse of the layout:
It's extra work, but having that single pane for the *entire* team to see the state of things reduced the "who's on point?" confusion. How are you handling the triage ownership day-to-day?
Dashboards or it didn't happen.