In The World of Citizen Development, Traditional Security Models Fail.
Citizen development allows users from across the organization to get the business apps and integrations they require quickly, without putting pressure on overstretched IT teams to create those solutions for them.
However, there is an inherent security risk in the citizen development model:
- Organizations have no way of identifying data leakage or suspicious activity derived from applications created by citizen developers.
The result can be pandemonium, with little to no control over which business data is exposed, or where it is exposed to. - Organizations have no way of understanding where their risks lie, and no way of defining different levels of risk that would allow them to enforce actions that stop low-code/no-code applications from violating those policies.
This, too, undercuts control over sensitive data and can place the business at risk. - Organizations have no way of ensuring that citizen developer-built software solutions align with software security and governance standards.
- Organizations have no way of taking inventory of how many low-code/no-code applications exist within the organization, who built them and which data they can manage, and if they present a potential risk.
- Citizen development tools can often be deployed as SaaS applications with no oversight from centralized IT.
- The more organizations make use of citizen development, the greater all of the problems above become.
More citizen developers mean more makers, more apps, automations or integrations, and more tools in the mix, all of which can amplify security risks.
Zenity Ensures Citizen Developers Are Responsible Developers.
Zenity lets citizen developers use no-code/low-code platforms for creating the solutions they need, while also ensuring those solutions meet centrally-defined security and compliance requirements. Zenity’s solution for securing citizen development hinges on 3 key pillars: Visibility at scale, risk assessment, and governance.

Zenity provides a continuously updated cross-platform inventory of which no-code/low-code applications, automations or integrations exist within the organization, who built them, creation and modification timeline, change tracking, and which data the apps can manage.
It also generates visualization capabilities to investigate resource relationships, and it provides at-a-glance views of data movement that results from citizen-developed apps, automations or integrations – no matter how many platforms, environments or resources you have.

Zenity provides built-in security controls that allow citizen-developed apps, automations or integrations to be held to the same security and governance standards as apps created by professional developers.
Want to identify insecure transfer of business data, insecure user authentication, or lack of PoLP, for example? Zenity lets you do that, in a continuous, centralized way.

Zenity doesn’t just tell you where your risks lie. It also allows you to mitigate them as quickly as possible using customizable automated management and enforcement playbooks.
Zenity does this by building guardrails ,and playbooks, based on the business logic of your apps, and enabling you to set them per low-code/no-code platform or environment – such as production vs. personal productivity . That means security integrations are baked into the applications’ core, regardless of which tools your citizen developers use to create the apps or how those tools are used within your organization. They’re also highly customizable, so you can define triggers and actions based on your unique requirements.
Hello, Citizen Developers.
Goodbye, Security Risks.
Citizen development is a powerful strategy for businesses, and many are likely to continue to scale up citizen developer initiatives in the coming years. With Zenity, businesses can capitalize fully on everything that citizen development has to offer, without worrying about the security and compliance risks that can undercut the value of this approach.
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