The email arrived at 3 PM on a Friday: "Security review complete. Found 23 issues that need to be addressed before we can approve the release."

The engineering team had been working toward this release for six weeks. It was supposed to go live Monday morning. The 23 "issues" ranged from legitimate concerns to smaller issues about log formatting. The security team was thorough, but they were also the reason this company's release cycle had stretched from weekly to monthly over the past year.

"We've become the department of 'no,'" the CISO said. "Every conversation with engineering starts with them asking what we're going to block this time."

The Hidden Tax of Security Friction

This story isn't unique. Security teams, in their earnest attempt to protect the organization, inadvertently become the constraint that limits business velocity.

The math is telling: companies implementing "shift left" security see 38% reduction in security-related development delays (Forrester TEI Study 2023). Yet organizations take an average of 18 months to achieve meaningful DevSecOps integration (Forrester 2023). In the meantime, security friction compounds.

Consider the hidden costs:

Opportunity Cost: "Our competitor shipped the same feature three weeks before us. The security review delay cost us our first-mover advantage," one startup founder told us.

Context Loss: "When we get security feedback two weeks later, I have to re-learn my own code," explained a developer.

Workaround Culture: "We stopped calling them 'security features' and started calling them 'stability improvements,'" admitted one engineering manager.

From Gatekeeping to Enablement

The most successful security teams have made a fundamental shift: their job isn't to prevent things from happening—it's to help things happen securely.

Gatekeeping mindset: Security reviews at the end, binary approval decisions, reactive problem-solving.

Enablement mindset: Security built into workflows, automated checks with human escalation, proactive risk assessment.

The difference? Gatekeeping treats security as a checkpoint. Enablement treats it as a capability.

What Actually Works

Automate the Obvious: Create automated checks for common patterns. "We went from reviewing 40 configurations a week to reviewing 3 exceptions," one security engineer said.

Document Decision Criteria: Replace "security team needs to review" with "must meet criteria X, Y, Z, or escalate." This alone can eliminate 60-70% of routine reviews.

Create Security Champions: Train interested developers to handle security decisions within their teams. Only 27% of development teams receive adequate security training (Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024), but those that do become force multipliers.

Embed in Planning: Security input during sprint planning prevents weeks of rework later. "We'd rather spend 30 minutes in planning than 3 hours in review," a security architect explained.

Measure What Matters

Traditional security metrics (vulnerabilities found, reviews completed) don't capture business impact. Better metrics:

• Time from commit to production

• Security issue recurrence rate

• Developer security confidence scores

• Security escalation rate

One VP of Engineering tracks "security surprise rate" - how often security concerns emerge that weren't anticipated. "Our goal is zero surprises, not zero risk."

The Cultural Shift

From: "You can't do that, it's insecure." To: "Here's how to do that securely."

From: "Security review required." To: "Security guidelines available, escalate if questions."

From: "Found 23 issues." To: "Identified 3 critical issues and 20 improvement opportunities."

One CTO instituted a rule: "Any security objection must come with an alternative solution." This forced security teams to move from blocking to problem-solving.

When Gates Still Matter

Smart security teams focus their gatekeeping energy on high-risk changes, compliance-critical areas, new technology adoption, and external integrations. The key is making these gates predictable, fast, and educational.

The Business Impact

A Head of Product quantified the change: "Our average feature went from 8 weeks concept-to-production to 5 weeks. That's 37% faster time to market."

But the real value isn't just speed—it's innovation. Teams that view security as an enabler take on more ambitious projects instead of playing it safe.

Start Simple

If your security team has become a bottleneck, start with one question: "What would it look like if security helped us ship faster instead of slower?"

Pick one high-frequency, low-risk workflow to transform. Automate what you can, educate where automation falls short, and reserve human judgment for decisions that truly require it.

The goal isn't to eliminate security rigor—it's to eliminate security friction. In a world where business velocity determines competitive advantage, security can either be your accelerator or your brake.