Domain: Information
Question:
A healthcare technology organization operating under aggressive release cycles is attempting to recover from a failed security audit that revealed systemic issues, including overly permissive access models, inconsistent credential handling, and security practices that were largely disconnected from daily development workflows. The leadership team has chosen to use the Microsoft Cybersecurity Reference Architecture (MCRA) as a guiding framework while modernizing their cloud infrastructure and formalizing a DevSecOps operating model.
The organization is explicitly trying to avoid two failure modes it has experienced in the past:

treating security as a periodic compliance exercise driven by meetings and checkpoints, and
introducing heavyweight security governance that slows delivery and undermines developer autonomy.

At the same time, leadership expects security to be continuously enforced across the application lifecycle, consistent with zero-trust assumptions and modern healthcare compliance expectations.
From the perspective of MCRA-aligned DevSecOps maturity, explain how the organization should think about coordination cadence between development and security over time, including how that cadence may evolve as security guardrails become established. In your response, clarify how accountability should be divided between security leadership and development leadership in a way that avoids security becoming either a bottleneck or an afterthought. Finally, describe the role of platform-level security tooling in reducing reliance on manual coordination, and how that tooling supports continuous security without requiring constant human intervention.

Expected points in a correct answer:
States that under MCRA, security must be continuously enforced rather than periodically reviewed
References "least privilege" as necessary to correct overly permissive access models
References design-oriented coordination as a guardrail approach to address the disconnect between security and development workflows
States that in a matured DevSecOps, access decisions must be continuously verified rather than implicitly trusted
Associates a matured DevSecOps to when Zero Trust and/or compliance controls are embedded into engineering workflow
Connects credential handling problems to systemic identity or access control weaknesses
Frames DevSecOps as part of broader enterprise architecture rather than as a tool or feature
States that coordination cadence depends on the DevSecOps maturity level of an organization
States that, at the initial phase, coordination should be relatively frequent due to it being human intensive or manual
States that, at the later phase, coordination should be less frequent since its now less manual due to established guardrails or automation or platform-level security
States that reduced coordination does not mean reduced security enforcement
Mentions that, to avoid bottleneck, security governance should not require manual approval for every change
States that developer autonomy can be preserved while security standards are enforced
Mentions guardrails as constraints that enable safe autonomy rather than restrict delivery speed
States that security leadership owns defining security standards and/or policy and/or guardrails
States that development leadership owns developing secure code and remediation of vulnerabilities within defined SLAs
States that development is responsible for the software or code it ships or that security is not the quality gate for code correctness, that engineering is
Avoids assigning total responsibility for security exclusively to either security teams or development teams
States that platform-level tooling or platform-level security is a mechanism for automated enforcement of security
Gave at least one example of platform-level tooling as any of the following: infrastructure-as-code, mandatory static and dependency scanning, policy evaluation before deployment, or identity-centric control plane
States that tooling reduces the need for recurring manual coordination via any of the following: secure defaults, just-in-time-elevation, templates, or continuous monitoring and drift detection
Mentions that platform tooling enforces automated access control and/or identity constraints or integrates central identity provider
Mentions a platform tooling that validates application or infrastructure security before deployment such as pre-approved infrastructure modules
Mentions platform tooling that monitors security posture after deployment, such as continuous monitoring and drift detection, detection of over-permissive roles, or automated remediation
Mentions how tooling supports continuous evidence generation or audit readiness such as Continuous Monitoring and Drift Detection
Describes a three-part accountability model that separates policy ownership, enforcement ownership, and implementation ownership
States that guardrails are enforced technically rather than socially
States that security failures in the pipeline prevent release automatically without requiring a meeting
Mentions secure defaults as a mechanism where developers inherit security controls rather than implementing them manually
Mentions default encryption and logging as examples of secure defaults
States that security leadership owns zero-trust architecture definition
Mentions automated remediation as a capability of continuous monitoring tooling