Security and risk professionals have long used security threat modeling to find security vulnerabilities. However, many of your application development colleagues don't even know what threat modeling is. By communicating the benefits of threat modeling — namely, its ability to identify and mitigate security vulnerabilities early in the software development life cycle — you can help ensure that applications are more secure from the start. Microsoft's SDL Threat Modeling Tool, which was created to make Microsoft's Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) more accessible to application development shops, can help with this effort.