Kicking off 2022 by recognizing DevSecOps leaders

As we start the new year, it’s natural to look back at some of the highlights from the previous 12 months. One high point for us was SnykCon 2021, which brought together the brainpower of more than ten thousand developers and security practitioners from all over the world. Together we watched, listened, and learned as industry leaders from companies including Anheuser-Busch Inbev, Atlassian, Bain, Manulife, and Twitter took to our virtual stage to together advance the global DevSecOps movement.   

As we start to plan for SnykCon 2022, we’re once again reflecting on the interesting and inspiring customer stories we first heard back in October. Our customers are at the heart of Snyk’s success as each day, it’s these people and organizations that drive our mission to empower every software developer in the world to develop fast while staying secure.

During last year’s SnykCon, we were honored to host our second annual Customer Awards, where our winners were chosen for embracing a modern approach to securing application development and bridging the gap between development and security teams. Nominations were incredibly competitive, and in some cases, we gave out multiple recognitions.

This select group of Snyk customers was honored for everything from championing innovation to influencing their peers to fully embracing a shift left approach. In addition, this year we also created a new category, the Social Impact Award, timed with the launch of Snyk Impact. Together with our customers, users, partners, and employees, we’ll continue to work to help create a more secure, inclusive, and sustainable software development and social impact sector in 2022 and beyond.

Innovator Award

Recognizing leaders who champion a cutting-edge approach to security.

Lendi: Luiz Glingani, Platform Team Lead

Lendi started using Snyk in July 2021, with the goal of managing their SaaS products with a configuration as code approach. Luiz and the Lendi engineering team were integral in building their own Terraform provider and even made it publicly available for other Snyk customers to use. By opening this project, Lendi has encouraged new ideas when it comes to collaboration between the engineering and application security disciplines.

Unity: Simo Punnonen, Senior Security Software Engineer

Simo has been instrumental in accelerating adoption and consistency across the diverse development team at Unity. Simo identified the need for a one-size-fits-all framework for Snyk Open Source in order to standardize deployment and maximize success. With assistance from Snyk’s customer success team, Simo developed a wrapper that encapsulates all of Snyk’s language, CLI, and UI differences to bring consistency and ease of adoption for Unity’s development team.

Influencer Award

Celebrating inspiring leaders who share invaluable lessons with the Snyk community.

Flo Health:Leo Cunningham, CISO

Leo is an active contributor in the community, participating in speaking events, media articles, and webinars to share learnings from Flo Health’s successful approach to DevSecOps. Leo strongly supports enabling security without slowing down development by leveraging automation, creating visibility, and sharing insights. Notably, Flo Health has gamified security for their developers through its Security Champions program, enabling teams and individuals to compete for resolving the most vulnerabilities in the software development lifecycle.

Pearson: Nick Vinson, Head of DevSecOps

Nick was chosen for the Influencer Award for his wealth of knowledge and experience building the Security Engineering function including a world class Security Champions program at Pearson. He has generously shared his experience via podcasts and through speaking engagements at multiple industry events.

DevSecOps Award

Honoring leaders whose profound approaches have bridged development, security, and operations.

Datto:Dave McCheyne, DevOps Architect

Dave, along with the dedicated DevSecOps Engineers at Datto, support over 400 software developers in embracing secure development through a strong Security Champions program. Dave is responsible for delivering training sessions, integrations, and CI/CD tools to Datto's DevSecOps Engineers and Security Champions, then disseminated to all of the company's global teams.

Guild Education:Javier Perez, Manager, DevOps Engineering; Dejan Rajkovic, Senior Engineer, DevOps

Javier and Dejan have been instrumental in automating Snyk into their software development lifecycle and supporting a phased approach to developer adoption. Helping developers embrace security within their development processes and aligning the security team to work more effectively with developer teams has enabled Javier and Dejan to seamlessly make security a top priority for all of their cross-functional teams at Guild.

Security Champion Award

Highlighting leaders who fully embrace a shift left approach to security.

CVS Health: Amanda Alvarez, Technical Security Product Owner

Amanda’s developer-centric approach to application security focuses on managing everything as code by automating remediation and deeply integrating application security tooling into developer workflows, while maintaining delivery velocity. Her overall goal is to create higher standards to shift security left at CVS Health.

KeyBank: Kathy Peters, Info Security Manager; Bob Olander, Senior Info Security Consultant; Ron Matthews, Senior Info Security Consultant; Nacole Beverly, Info Security Consultant; Eric Johnson, Info Security Consultant; Durasia Anderson, KTOS Associate

The KeyBank team has an unmatched commitment to promoting developer security. They’ve built a strong and active Security Champions program, which includes members across the entire organization showing true dedication to developer security.

Patch Award

Given to those who echo Snyk’s mission of building securely.

10x Banking: Gagan Bhatia, Head of Cybersecurity Delivery

10x Banking stands out when it comes to patching vulnerabilities. Given their software is leveraged by some of the world's largest financial services organizations, ensuring the platform’s security and resilience is of paramount importance. 10x has conducted a record two million tests and fixed over 200,000 vulnerabilities since becoming a Snyk customer. Under Gagan’s leadership, their approach to fixing is world class, with a particular focus on fixing fast.

Acuity Knowledge Partners: Sameer Goyal, Director, Head of Engineering

Acuity is one of the most proactive Snyk customers in terms of fixing every single issue that is raised. They have achieved 100% adoption and Sameer’s team is dedicated to fixing all critical issues within less than a day. Sameer has been one of the key leaders to drive this effort and has set the bar high for secure development.

Social Impact Award

Recognizing leaders who drive social or environmental impact.

Classy: Chris Himes, CEO

Classy is on a mission to mobilize and empower the world for good. Snyk honored Classy with its first Social Impact Award as the company has built a powerful software platform for organizations to create engaging and intuitive giving experiences, raise more funds, and increase their programmatic impact.

Looking ahead to 2022

To the customers above, one last _thank you_for your trust in Snyk and for your leadership in advancing DevSecOps. As we look ahead, we can’t wait to see the continuation of your amazing work. Congratulations once again to our 2021 Customer Award Winners!

If you weren't able to join us live at SnykCon 2021, you can still watch all of the engaging sessions. And stay tuned for more info on SnykCon 2022 soon!