Dear Santa, all I want for Christmas is better security tools

A whimsical holiday letter I imagine a CISO might write. Happy holidays!

Dear Santa,

My security team has been working incredibly hard this year — responding to incidents at 2am, reviewing dozens of product launches, and somehow still finding time to implement more robust authentication. (Have you considered implementing passkeys at the North Pole?)

Solutions, not problems

Santa, I know you’re already tracking countless security alerts at the North Pole, so you’ll understand this one: please help our vendors realize that we don’t need more tools highlighting problems. I don’t need another system telling me we have 437 critical vulnerabilities or that someone shared a doc with the wrong permissions. At this point, I could build a museum of monitoring tools, each showing me problems none of them can fix. What we need are tools that actually help us fix these issues. Send me an automated PR with the dependency update. Show me one-click options to adjust sharing settings. Help me solve problems, not just find more of them.

The real cost here is that every new alert without a solution creates more work for an already overwhelmed team. Finding issues is the easy part my team needs help with the harder challenge of fixing them efficiently at scale.

I wish I could have tools that understand our environment well enough to safely automate fixes while handling exceptions (big ask, I know). Tools that could analyze impact, suggest practical solutions, and help us implement them efficiently. That would let my team focus on the complex security challenges that really need human expertise, instead of drowning in alerts and routine fixes.

Modern developer experience

Santa, could you please help everyone understand that security engineers are engineers — they need APIs, not ancient artifacts. We need tools that work like modern developer tools, not like security tools from 2005. Having to click through nested menus to find basic configuration settings is just frustrating.

Security tools should have CLI support that isn’t just a wrapper around API calls, APIs that are actually documented, and UIs that make sense. And please give us reasonable defaults. If most of your customers are going to enable encryption at rest or set up expiring access, maybe start with those turned on.

The impact goes beyond just lost time — every minute my team spends fighting with clunky interfaces or re-implementing basic security controls is a minute they’re not spending on more valuable security work. Modern engineering teams automate as much as they can — my security teram wants to do the same. Our tools should help with that, not fight against it. When engineering teams can self-serve security with tools integrate naturally into their workflow, everyone wins.

Bring us security tools that are a joy to use — where configurations are version controlled, changes are integrated into our CI/CD workflow, and the API documentation is actually up to date. My team needs to focus on securing our systems, not reverse engineering how to use our security tools.

Platforms over point solutions

While we’re talking about consolidation — could we maybe get fewer standalone tools in our stockings this year? I’ll need a spreadsheet just to track all our security solutions. We don’t want another vulnerability scanner — that requires its own vendor assessment, another set of credentials to manage, and another training session to schedule.

We need platforms that reduce our operational overhead. Something that brings related capabilities together, simplifies our vendor relationships — and yes, shows up as one line item instead of twelve. Tools that understand they’re part of a larger security ecosystem, not an island unto themselves.

Beyond the obvious cost implications, every new tool means another procurement cycle, another security review, another set of processes to document. My team needs to focus on securing our organization, not becoming experts in twenty different tool interfaces.

Santa, bring us unified platforms that solve whole classes of problems. Tools that work together through standardized integrations instead of creating new silos. My team deserves better than spending their days building glue code between security tools.

Complete environment coverage

Santa, I have a confession: we’re not just running one cloud provider with identical VMs anymore. (Shocking, I know.) We’ve got Windows laptops, Mac workstations, Linux servers, containers, multiple clouds, SaaS tools, and even some systems that might be older than the elves. Our security tools need to handle this reality.

We need solutions that can actually work across our entire infrastructure — not just claim they do in the sales pitch. That means supporting every endpoint type we manage, understanding each cloud provider’s quirks, and yes, even dealing with those special snowflake legacy systems.

Security gaps aren’t just technical debt — they’re real risks. Every environment we can’t properly secure is a potential blind spot. Every platform we can’t monitor means more uncertainty and risk. Every “we don’t support that yet” means more custom tooling my team has to maintain.

Santa, bring us tools that truly understand our complex environments. Tools that handle the messy reality of enterprise infrastructure, not just the clean architecture diagrams from the sales deck. My team needs complete coverage, not just coverage of the parts that are easy to support.

Scale security impact

Finally, Santa, what my team really needs is the ability to scale our impact. Our engineering team keeps growing (which is great!), but unfortunately, my security team can’t grow at the same rate (which is… challenging). We want to scale our security engineer to developer ratio non-linearly — and we want tools that let us do this.

We need solutions that help automate routine work and enable developers to handle security tasks safely on their own. Give me guardrails that scale, not gates that fail. Self-service capabilities that don’t create more work for my team. Workflows that adjust and scale with our organization.

Security teams will never grow as fast as engineering teams — nor should they need to. Every manual review, every access request ticket, every “ask security” checkpoint creates friction that slows down the business. And more importantly, it burns out my team.

Santa, bring us tools that actually help us scale. Tools that make both security and development teams more effective, not just more busy. My team needs to be able to secure our growing organization without working nights and weekends to keep up.

Well, Santa, that’s my security team’s wish list this year. I know it’s a lot to ask, but we’ve been really good — we patched quickly after the xz fiasco, we’ve completed all the critical items from this year’s incident postmortems, and we’ve even managed to get engineering to use our approved CI/CD pipeline most of the time.

I promise we’ll leave out cookies for you — and only you. And yes, we’ve finally updated our incident response plan to account for your annual December 24th authentication exception.

My team deserves tools that solve problems instead of just finding them, that work like modern software instead of ancient artifacts, that cover our whole environment instead of tiny pieces, and that help us scale our impact across the organization. And if you could wrap all of that up in solutions that actually work together… well, that would be a Christmas miracle.

Here’s hoping for a more secure and less exhausting 2025.

Yours truly,
A wishful CISO