Why Building Is Back in Cybersecurity And What It Means For Your Career

For the past decade, security teams have been outsourcing our ability to build anything meaningful. They've become glorified procurement specialists, not security engineers.

I've watched security teams transform from builders to buyers. From creators to consumers. From engineers to evaluators.

The typical security department today has a handful of analysts, a small army of GRC professionals, and maybe - if they're lucky - one or two actual engineers who can build something from scratch.

We've convinced ourselves this is progress. That buying off-the-shelf solutions from vendors is the "mature" approach. That building custom tools is somehow unprofessional or unsustainable.

But this shift has come at a devastating cost: we've surrendered our autonomy, creativity, and ultimately, our effectiveness.

In this article, I'll show security leaders why the pendulum is swinging back to building, how AI is democratizing development capabilities across security teams, and the specific steps you can take to rebuild your team's engineering muscle. You'll learn how to identify high-impact automation opportunities, develop a practical building strategy that doesn't require hiring an army of engineers, and prepare your team for a future where building is no longer optional.

How We Lost Our Building Muscle

The erosion of our building capabilities didn't happen overnight.

It started innocently enough with the cloud revolution. As infrastructure moved to AWS, Azure, and GCP, the complexity of security tooling increased exponentially. Suddenly, building and maintaining custom security tools required specialized knowledge that many teams simply didn't have.

Then came the SaaS explosion and the pitch was compelling: focus on your core business and let us handle the technical heavy lifting.

Security leaders, already struggling with talent shortages and mounting compliance requirements, embraced this model wholeheartedly. We traded building for buying, engineering for evaluating, and creation for consumption.

The results speak for themselves:

• Skyrocketing costs with diminishing returns
• Endless integration challenges and data silos
• Complete dependence on vendors for innovation
• Security teams drowning in vendor management
• Bloated security stacks with dozens of disconnected tools

I recently spoke with a CISO at a mid-sized fintech who confessed: "We have 43 security tools, but can't answer basic questions about our security posture. We're spending millions on vendors but can't automate a simple offboarding workflow."

This is the reality for most security teams today. We've become hostages to our vendors, waiting for them to build the features we need, integrate with the systems we use, and solve the problems we face.

The AI Inflection Point

But something fundamental has changed. We're at an inflection point that will redefine what's possible for security teams.

AI - specifically generative AI with its ability to understand context, generate code, and interface with systems - is democratizing the ability to build.

It's a paradigm shift that will separate forward-thinking security teams from those stuck in the procurement trap.

Here's what's different now:

1. Code generation has become accessible to non-engineers. Tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Claude can generate functional code from natural language descriptions. You no longer need a CS degree to create useful automation.
2. AI agents and tool calling capabilities are enabling seamless integration between systems. What used to require complex API development can now be accomplished through "AI-powered orchestration".
3. Low-code/no-code platforms have matured, allowing security professionals to build sophisticated workflows without writing traditional code.
4. The economics have flipped. Building custom solutions is becoming cheaper than buying and integrating vendor products for many use cases.