Avatao success story: Implementing continuous secure coding training

The Switzerland-based software company Adnovum offers its clients comprehensive support in the fast and secure digitalization of business processes from design to implementation. In addition to business process digitization, its core competencies include identity and access management as well as security solutions. Adnovum has offices in Switzerland, Hungary, Portugal, Vietnam, and Singapore. It focuses on companies and organizations that want to differentiate themselves through innovative digitalization solutions, among them banks, insurance companies, and public sector organizations.

As specialists in the design, implementation, and maintenance of software and security solutions, Adnovum has to make sure their deliverables are secure and resistant to external threats. Due to their growth and the number of different locations, they needed to find a scalable and practical online security training without it ending up as a compliance chore. They already offered security presentations, hack-days, and individual security courses for developers, but not an online security education platform for continuous security education, which was needed as part of their Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SSDLC).

To ensure regular and targeted security education and technical training for Adnovum developers, two custom modules with specifically selected Avatao challenges are put together every year. The first one serves as a baseline course for new employees, while the second one contains more complex challenges to provide a continuous learning experience. Additional information with links to internal Adnovum context and guidelines is presented as Confluence pages to supplement the practical training.

Avatao helped Adnovum present security in an exciting way with practical exercises covering baseline security topics that are not only relevant and interesting, but also engaging for their engineering teams. They set the key metrics as part of the training evaluation (participation rate, completion rate of modules, time spent on challenges) that were easy to track via the platform. Adnovum received positive feedback from their engineers about enjoying the hands-on experience of solving concrete challenges in otherwise too abstract security topics. Using the Avatao platform helped relieve the team from engineering their own security challenges and operating their own training platform.