How to Build a Lean Security Model: 5 Lessons from River Island

In today’s security landscape, budgets are tight, attack surfaces are sprawling, and new threats emerge daily. Maintaining a strong security posture under these circumstances without a large team or budget can be a real challenge. Yet lean security models are not only possible – they can be highly effective.

River Island, one of the UK’s leading fashion retailers, offers a powerful case study on how to do more with less. As River Island’s InfoSec Officer, Sunil Patel and his small team of three are responsible for securing over 200 stores, an e-commerce platform, a major distribution center, and head offices. With no headcount growth on the horizon, Sunil had to rethink how security could scale effectively.

By adopting a lean security model, powered by Intruder’s exposure management platform, the team was able to improve visibility, respond faster to threats, and empower others across the business to fix what matters most.

Here are five key lessons from their approach that any security team can apply.

1. Automate Attack Surface Visibility

A lean security model relies on the ability to quickly and clearly understand your external attack surface. River Island’s team lacked a central way to track what was exposed to the internet. Without a single, up-to-date view of their internet-facing assets, they relied on spreadsheets and manual checks and struggled to keep up with new risks stemming from a constantly changing infrastructure.

By adopting continuous network monitoring as part of their exposure management process, the team now detects attack surface changes automatically. When a new or unexpected service – like a login page, admin panel, or database – becomes accessible from the internet, they’re notified in real-time. This gives Sunil and his team a live, accurate view of what’s exposed and makes it easy to start automatically scanning these exposed assets for vulnerabilities.

2. Select the Right Tools for the Job

The last thing a lean team needs is a stack of overlapping tools – each doing little, none doing enough.

River Island had a range of security solutions in place, but many were underutilized. Sunil estimated they were “only getting about 5-6% of the possible value” from some products.

Rather than adding more to the mix, the team consolidated. This means less time spent context-switching and more time acting on clear, unified insights. With a smaller toolkit, it is easier to build the integrations and automation that are an essential part of being lean.

3. Automate Emerging Threat Detection

High-profile vulnerabilities like Log4j put lean teams under immense pressure. When critical vulnerabilities emerge, your ability to stay secure depends on how quickly you can assess exposure. But with limited resources, scrambling to do this manually is inefficient and unsustainable.

Unified exposure management platforms like Intruder take the pressure off by automatically scanning for newly disclosed critical vulnerabilities so that you’re not left waiting for your next weekly or monthly scan to find out whether you have an issue.

Speaking to the impact of this, Sunil said, “When Log4j hit, our CIO asked if we were affected. I could tell him straight away: ‘We’re good – Intruder’s scanned for it and we’re in the clear.’”

This level of assurance builds trust with leadership, avoids unnecessary fire drills, and frees up the team to focus on remediation rather than investigation.

4. Enable Asset Owners to Fix Issues Fast

In adopting a lean security model, the goal isn’t to fix everything yourself – it’s to make sure the right people are equipped to fix the right things, fast. That means removing the security team as a bottleneck and empowering others to remediate weaknesses.

“One of my goals was to take the security team out of the equation completely from a process perspective,” said Sunil.

Previously, the InfoSec team was responsible for chasing down asset owners and translating technical recommendations for non-security experts. Now, by integrating their exposure management platform with Jira, vulnerabilities are routed directly to the relevant teams – along with easy-to-follow instructions needed to take action.

This shift has freed up InfoSec to focus on higher priorities, while service delivery managers handle day-to-day remediation.

Sunil said, “We’re not the nagging manager anymore. We just monitor and make sure things are progressing.”

5. Report on Cyber Hygiene

When you’re running a lean security team, the last thing you want is to spend your limited time manually pulling reports or communicating updates to stakeholders. But visibility still matters – especially at the leadership level.

At River Island, that trust was built by shifting away from ad-hoc reporting towards automated dashboards that clearly show what’s exposed, what’s been fixed, and what still needs attention.

Sunil said, “I told my CIO, ‘You don’t have many one-to-ones with me,’ and he laughed and said, ‘That’s a good thing – it means nothing’s broken. Intruder gives him the confidence that we’ve got it covered, so he doesn’t need to check-in. That’s how I know things are working.”

Small Teams, Big Impact

Being lean doesn’t mean being underpowered. With the right tools, processes, and mindset, security teams of any size can build scalable, resilient, and efficient operations. River Island’s experience shows that doing more with less isn’t just possible – it can be a smarter, more sustainable approach to security.

Under pressure to do more with less? Try Intruder for free with a 14-day trial.

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