By Molly Peck
For a growing business, robust tech infrastructure is essential. However, many startups and mid-sized companies either pour money into underutilized tools or wait until a crisis, like an outage or a security breach, forces them to upgrade. Maxim Khomutinnikov, a cybersecurity engineer and application security expert at ADP, believes there's a more intelligent approach. Maxim, also an adjunct professor at Pace University and a 2025 Product of the Year Award winner, emphasizes building secure, scalable systems without draining your budget. He's a certified specialist in cloud and cybersecurity (AWS, Akamai, ISC2), a member of IEEE. He has served as a judge for prestigious digital awards such as Global Innovator-2025 and the Digital Leaders Awards. His expertise spans enterprise automation, academic instruction, and cutting-edge security research.
Here are three practical strategies to enhance your tech infrastructure's security and scalability, all while keeping costs in check.
1. Automate Early to Reduce Long-Term Costs
Fixing problems after they happen is like trying to patch a leaking pipe with duct tape — it might hold for a while, but it’s messy and costly. Automating your security is more like installing a smart valve system that monitors pressure and prevents leaks before they happen. It lets companies respond quicker, cut down on costly mistakes, and save money on manual work and emergency repairs.
At ADP, Maxim played one of the critical roles in creating automated security pipelines that became a vital part of the company’s ongoing integration and delivery process. Managing product and application records, where even minor security gaps could have serious consequences, he developed Python-based automations that gather real-time risk signals, prioritize them by severity, and seamlessly integrate into deployment workflows to ensure updates are fast, consistent, and secure. One remarkable innovation was designing context-aware alerts: instead of overwhelming developers with vague warnings, his system clearly explained each risk and guided developers toward quick, focused solutions.
“Security automation isn’t just a technical upgrade. It’s a business efficiency lever first of all,” Maxim explains. “When your system flags and ranks threats in real time, you’re not only protecting data, you’re protecting developer time, which is just as valuable.”
2. Build Modularity to Support Growth Without Rewrites
The cleverest way to scale up is to avoid tearing things down and starting from scratch. Think of modularity as building with LEGO bricks—you can simply add or replace parts without disturbing the rest. This approach allows your technology to grow organically, bit by bit, rather than demanding expensive rewrites every time your requirements shift.
Take, for instance, Khomutinnikov’s work on an internal enterprise platform designed to streamline user onboarding and data handling at scale. He architected modular, role-based registration and authorization flows using React, making each user-facing component—from secure login to personalized dashboards—plug-and-play within the system. Sophisticated multi-level forms built with Formik allowed for flexible validation and data capture across varied use cases, including PDF/image uploads and server-side generation of custom templates. These modules operated independently, yet integrated seamlessly through a layered AWS-backed architecture leveraging EC2, ELB, and IAM. Even as business requirements evolved, including changes to compliance and data-handling logic, the platform required no major rewrites. Instead, its modular foundation enabled effortless scaling and rapid adaptation—proof that engineering for flexibility up front is the key to sustainable innovation.
“Modularity isn’t just about clean code,” he says. “It’s about agility. If you can swap parts of your system without breaking others, you move faster, save money, and keep your product flexible.”
3. Embed Security Upfront to Avoid Future Losses
Security should be incorporated into your architecture from the beginning, not added on later. This means accounting for threat detection, user behavior, and privacy from the outset.
In his published research on adaptive web application firewalls, Maxim explored how AI agents can boost detection accuracy with minimal false positives. Drawing from this academic foundation, he later helped develop processes that ensured vulnerabilities were identified and addressed before applications were released into production, embedding security checks directly into CI/CD workflows.
“The real win is in the problems that never happen,” says Maxim. “If you bake security into the system from the start, you’re not just putting out fires—you’re making sure they don’t even spark in the first place.”
Beyond technical workflows, Khomutinnikov emphasizes several principles that make security both effective and practical. One is the idea of psychological acceptability: security should be so easy and transparent that people naturally use it instead of trying to bypass it. Another is reusing proven, widely tested libraries rather than inventing custom cryptographic algorithms. As he explains, “When you stick to standards like AES or other validated tools, you avoid hidden weaknesses that often appear in homemade solutions.”
He also highlights the importance of a Modular Open Systems Approach (MOSA), which means designing systems with interchangeable, well-supported components. This approach makes it easier to adapt, scale, and upgrade without expensive overhauls. Together, these practices ensure that security is not only strong but also usable, affordable, and future-proof.
Scalable, secure infrastructure doesn’t require enterprise-level budgets. It requires discipline: automate where possible, design for growth, embed security early, and upskill your team. Maxim’s cross-sector experience shows that with the right mindset, any company—not just tech giants—can build systems that are fast, safe, and built to last.
