Security and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams often operate as separate entities within organizations despite sharing similar goals: keeping systems secure, reliable, and performant. Security teams focus on protecting systems from threats and ensuring compliance with regulatory frameworks. SRE teams concentrate on system reliability, performance optimization, and incident management.
With similar goals of creating a secure and reliable system, security and SRE teams should be natural collaborators. When SRE teams design for failure recovery, they inevitably touch on security considerations like authentication failover and data protection during recovery processes. When security teams implement controls, they must consider how these measures affect system performance and reliability. However, in reality, the teams often exist in silos, not communicating with each other or finding tension when they have to work together, causing inefficiencies and security gaps to multiply.
These intersections should not be seen as sources of conflict but as opportunities for collaboration. When security principles inform reliability practices and infrastructure considerations shape security plans, the result is a stronger overall system and more efficient operations. However, realizing this potential requires breaking down the silos that separate these teams. With a tool like Cortex, organizations can create collaboration between SRE and security and unlock more efficiency, security, and quality for their products.
Where security and SRE teams can clash–and how Cortex can help
Incident response
When systems fail or anomalies emerge, these teams typically follow their own playbooks and communicate through different channels.
The disconnection often happens because security tools (vulnerability scanners, threat detection systems, compliance frameworks) generate their own alerts and metrics that don't automatically flow into the same dashboards and incident management systems that SREs use for operational issues. When an incident has both security and reliability dimensions, teams might be working on the same problem through different tools and processes.
For example, consider what happens when a production service experiences unusual traffic patterns. The SRE team immediately focuses on resource allocation, scaling, and maintaining availability, which is their primary responsibility. Meanwhile, the security team independently investigates potential breaches or attacks that might be causing the unusual patterns. Neither team has visibility into the other's actions or findings in the moment or in the future to inform future incidents.
How integrated tools improve incident handling
Cortex addresses this challenge by creating a unified incident management space where both teams work off of the same information. Its service catalog provides a single source of truth during incidents, showing real-time status, ownership information, and system dependencies that both teams can reference. Let’s say one team identifies unusual traffic patterns. With this shared information, both security and SRE engineers can see which services are affected, who owns them, recent changes that might have contributed to the problem, and coordinated response actions. This shared context closes the information gap that would otherwise get in the way of both teams’ incident response efforts and makes sure fixes tackle both security and reliability issues at the same time.
With Cortex, both SRE and security teams can connect with tools they already use, instead of replacing them. For example, Cortex can integrate with popular security tools like Snyk. When Snyk detects a critical vulnerability in a third-party dependency, both security teams and SREs can immediately see which services are affected and work together on appropriate mitigation strategies with Cortex. Through these integrations, SRE and security teams can monitor incidents from a centralized location without switching contexts or losing information in tool transitions. This creates a continuous thread of information from detection through resolution, eliminating the handoff problems that typically delay incident response.
With Cortex’s new integration with Rootly, an AI-native incident management platform, both security and SRE teams receive unified, real-time alerts that automatically consolidate service ownership, runbooks, and dependency maps. This streamlined approach eliminates tool-hopping and ensures that every stakeholder is immediately informed, enhancing collaboration and accelerating incident resolution.
Enforcing standards
The disconnect between security and reliability standards creates significant friction for development teams. Security teams establish compliance requirements based on industry frameworks like SOC 2, ISO 27001, and NIST, along with specific threat models and organizational policies. SRE teams separately define reliability standards through SLOs and SLAs based on customer expectations and business requirements. These two sets of standards often reach development teams through different channels, using different terminology, and with different implementation timelines.
This disconnect becomes particularly problematic during enforcement. Security teams traditionally enforce standards through periodic audits, spreadsheet tracking, and manual reviews that happen after code is already deployed. Meanwhile, SRE teams enforce reliability standards through continuous monitoring of logs, metrics, and dashboards. The result is contradictory guidance that forces developers to waste time understanding competing priorities and then make difficult tradeoffs about which things to implement. For instance, security might require network access restrictions that prevent the comprehensive monitoring needed by SRE teams, putting the development team in the middle to figure out what to do next.
Creating a common language for security and reliability priorities
Cortex transforms this experience by bringing security and reliability standards together with Scorecards. Scorecards actively enforce standards by automatically measuring services against custom-defined rules, and turn subjective priorities into measurable criteria. These rules can span security requirements, reliability standards, and migration initiatives. For example, when security teams want to enforce new encryption standards for certain services, they can define this as a specific Scorecard rule rather than an abstract goal. Similarly, when SRE teams need to ensure performance standards, they can codify those requirements in a new Scorecard or a shared one.
Scorecards also create a common language for prioritization. Leadership can view aggregated Scorecard results to identify which improvements would address the most critical gaps across security and reliability. Teams can organize tasks around specific deadlines and high-priority goals with the Initiatives feature, ensuring that critical security and reliability improvements receive appropriate attention and resources.
The result is more efficient development processes that maintain both security and reliability without sacrificing speed. Teams can build in standards from day one, avoiding the expensive process of fixing deployed services later and minimizing risks from compliance gaps
Ownership
Figuring out which team is responsible for what remains a persistent challenge where security and reliability meet. The problem stems from each team using different ownership tracking systems.
SRE teams typically manage service ownership through internal wikis, CMDBs, or microservice catalogs that track availability metrics and performance owners. Their primary concern is identifying who to page when a service degrades. Security teams, meanwhile, maintain separate spreadsheets or specialized tools cataloging which services are in compliance scope, which have encryption enabled, and which contain known vulnerabilities. These records get updated after each vulnerability scan or audit cycle. Traditional tooling can force organizations to rely on error-prone manual processes and cross-team coordination practices that break down during rapid growth, organizational change, or as we saw earlier, during incidents.
When these parallel systems inevitably drift apart, critical issues are bound to occur. Consider the following example: a security engineer discovers a critical vulnerability in a production API. The security team's spreadsheet indicates Team A owns the service. After hours of back-and-forth, they discover Team A transferred ownership to Team B three months ago. SRE has this information captured in their system but this never propagated to security's records. The vulnerability remains unpatched for days while teams determine who has the authorization and knowledge to implement the fix.
How defined ownership improves cross-team collaboration
Fortunately, Cortex solves this by creating a single source of truth for ownership across security and reliability domains. The platform automatically maps ownership relationships across teams, services, and infrastructure components, integrating with both security and SRE tracking systems. When ownership changes in one system, the new owner is automatically reflected in Cortex’s service catalog, so there’s never a discrepancy. Owners automatically receive notifications for critical events related to their services, from on-call rotation changes and verification requests to scorecard failures and compliance drift. This ensures the right teams know immediately when action is needed, without requiring manual escalation processes.
Each Scorecard rule can be assigned to specific owners: security teams for compliance requirements, SRE teams for reliability standards, or even joint ownership for shared concerns. When rules fail, notifications go directly to the responsible parties, so there’s no ambiguity. During cloud migrations or large architectural projects, Cortex maintains clear ownership mappings as responsibilities transition between teams, preventing the security and reliability issues that can arise when services are in more vulnerable states.
Cortex's always-on and always-up-date ownership drives engineering excellence by connecting people to events that matter. For technology leaders, this automation transforms ownership from static data into a dynamic operational lever that drives accountability and accelerates development across the engineering organization, including security and SRE.
Monitoring and visibility
Security and SRE teams use different monitoring and visibility tools, which creates data loss where security and reliability intersect. Security teams invest in SIEM systems, vulnerability scanners, and threat detection tools. SRE teams build dashboards around metrics, logs, and traces focused on performance and availability.
When performance degrades, SRE teams may lack visibility into security events that could be the root cause. A credential-based attack might cause system slowdowns that appear to SRE teams as inexplicable performance issues. Similarly, security teams might detect unusual access patterns without understanding their reliability impact, leading to overestimated or underestimated risk assessments. These visibility gaps extend to the executive level as well. CTOs and VPs of Engineering receive separate reports on security posture and system reliability, making it difficult to assess overall organizational health or make informed decisions about resource allocation.
How shared metrics empower security and SRE teams
With Cortex, teams can finally see metrics and complete information across security and reliability domains. It aggregates data from both security monitoring tools (like Snyk, Wiz, Checkmarx, and Mend) and SRE monitoring systems (like Prometheus and Sentry) to provide real-time dashboards and integrated views. Teams can view security metrics like vulnerability counts and compliance status alongside reliability indicators like error rates and latency so they can correlate events across domains and identify connections that would be invisible in siloed monitoring systems.
When security and SRE teams have visibility into other metrics and systems, they can do their jobs better. For security teams, understanding the reliability context around security events and knowing which services are most critical to availability helps prioritize vulnerability remediation. For SRE teams, it means gaining security context for reliability issues and potentially identifying security-related root causes for performance problems. And for leadership, it provides a holistic view of organizational health that spans both security and reliability.
Breaking down barriers once and for all
Without collaboration between security and SRE teams, incidents can drag on, security and reliability standards become inconsistent across the organization, and dangerous blind spots persist. Cortex addresses these challenges by creating a shared platform where security and SRE concerns receive visibility and priority—not through forced organizational restructuring, but by providing the tools and information both teams need to make informed decisions together.
Cortex helps engineering organizations shift from reactive, fragmented responses to proactive, coherent governance. Security considerations become embedded in reliability practices. Reliability impacts inform security implementations. And with visibility into both, leadership can balance decision-making across both domains.
These days, the separation between security and reliability is a liability organizations can no longer afford. With Cortex, they don't have to choose between being secure or being reliable—they can be both. Book a demo today to see for yourself.
