How should security teams evaluate a software provider’s commitment to secure by design practices?

Security teams should look for concrete commitments that show security is being built into development, operations, and customer support. A credible signal includes secure development practices, vulnerability disclosure, identity and access management controls, encryption, and incident monitoring. The value is not the pledge itself, but whether the organisation can show repeatable security outcomes and measurable accountability over time.

Why This Matters for Security Teams

A software provider’s secure by design posture is not a branding exercise. It is a signal of whether security is embedded in engineering decisions, release processes, vulnerability handling, and customer support before customers inherit the risk. The distinction matters because provider weaknesses often surface as downstream identity exposure, insecure defaults, or delayed remediation. NHI Management Group’s research shows 96% of organisations store secrets outside secrets managers in vulnerable locations, which is exactly the kind of failure secure by design should prevent.

Security teams should evaluate whether the provider can show repeatable controls, not just policy statements. That means looking for secure development lifecycle evidence, secret handling discipline, dependency management, logging, and a credible path from discovery to fix. It also means checking whether the provider has learned from incidents such as JetBrains GitHub plugin token exposure and the broader patterns seen in Hard-Coded Secrets in VSCode Extensions, where weak software supply chain practices created identity and secrets risk at scale.

In practice, many security teams discover a provider’s real maturity only after a customer-facing incident, not through the sales process or the security questionnaire.

How It Works in Practice

Evaluating secure by design starts with asking for evidence, not assurances. A strong provider can show how security requirements are built into product design reviews, code review, build pipelines, and release gates. Security teams should expect practical artefacts such as secure coding standards, threat modeling outputs, dependency scanning results, vulnerability disclosure timelines, and remediation SLAs. The provider should also be able to explain how identity and secrets are handled across development and operations, especially where software interacts with APIs, service accounts, or customer data.

Current guidance from NIST SP 800-53 Rev 5 Security and Privacy Controls supports this evidence-based approach through controls for secure development, configuration management, access control, logging, and incident response. For product categories that fall within the scope of the EU Cyber Resilience Act, secure by design expectations increasingly extend to vulnerability handling, update integrity, and lifecycle support. That is why procurement should test whether the provider can demonstrate:

• secure development practices with enforced review and testing gates
• vulnerability disclosure and patching processes with defined response times
• encryption for data in transit and at rest, including secrets handling
• least-privilege access for engineering, support, and production operations
• monitoring and logging that support detection, investigation, and customer notification

Providers that are mature on secure by design usually speak in measurable outcomes, such as fix times, scan coverage, and incident learnings, rather than vague claims about “security being a priority.” They should also be able to explain how supplier risk is managed, because software often fails through integrations, plugins, or exposed tokens rather than the core product itself. These controls tend to break down when the provider ships frequent changes through loosely governed CI/CD pipelines because the release velocity outpaces security review and revocation processes.

Common Variations and Edge Cases

Tighter scrutiny often increases procurement overhead, requiring organisations to balance confidence in the provider against the speed of acquisition. That tradeoff is especially visible with startups, open source vendors, and cloud services, where secure by design maturity may be uneven even when the product is functionally strong.

Best practice is evolving around how much proof is enough. There is no universal standard for this yet, so teams should treat claims as stronger when they are backed by external validation, recent remediation history, and transparent disclosure of known gaps. A smaller vendor may not have formal certifications, but it can still demonstrate credible secure by design behaviour through documented SDLC controls, responsive vulnerability handling, and clear support commitments.

Edge cases deserve extra attention when a provider’s software handles secrets, credentials, or automation tokens. This is where downstream identity exposure often appears, and why customer teams should ask how the provider prevents hard-coded secrets, over-privileged service accounts, and insecure plugin ecosystems. The most reliable signals are operational: how the provider patches, how fast it communicates, and whether it can explain what went wrong without deflecting responsibility.

In practice, secure by design fails most often when security is evaluated as a checkbox during vendor onboarding instead of as an ongoing measure of engineering discipline and incident readiness.

Related resources from NHI Mgmt Group

• Why do security champions improve secure software delivery in development teams?
• How should identity security teams apply secure-by-design principles to cloud-native governance platforms?
• How should security teams make NHI best practices usable across the business?
• How should security teams implement secure design in the software lifecycle?