Gone are the days of tossing over a “full fat” release with a belief that it will work well in production. Today, it is about better collaboration between teams, short sprints, productivity, quick releases, and stricter go-to-market windows. It is about being agile to fit the modern landscape.
That’s where DevOps comes into the picture. DevOps – is an extended agile approach to stimulate intense collaboration between the development and operations teams.
DevOps is a perfect fit for the organizations looking to reduce day-to-day vulnerabilities, bring speed and agility, and practice advanced software development lifecycle with utmost efficiency.
Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery – the key practice of DevOps has successfully changed the span of release cycle from years to weeks. However, DevOps without adding a security layer at every stage of the SDLC may dent the overall objective. This is where the DevSecOps approach was introduced.
DevSecOps is an integrated shared responsibility of every team to plugin security into each phase of the DevOps pipeline by automating codes and emphasizing on creating a robust and security governed software.
DevOps with the added dimension of ‘Security’ that came in practice to overcome the bottlenecks of conventional security methods decelerating the software delivery process. DevSecOps aims to embed security at every phase of the SDLC.
With DevOps, you have to move super-fast. There can be no 'manual' in that process. If you don't have automation, you'll never be successful.
— Chris Romeo - CEO, Principal Consultant, and Co-founder of Security Journey.
Integrating security controls and automating core security tasks is crucial to accelerate the overall DevOps workflow.
Understand how DevSecOps empowers businesses to be agile and achieve faster time to market.
According to Gartner, 40% more companies will start adopting DevSecOps and by 2022, 90% of software development projects will claim to be following its practices.
Key components of DevSecOps
Development operations and security are fundamentally entwined with DevSecOps. Combining a well- developed application with a secured system can help businesses achieve the rapid-time-to market, security, and agility. Let’s dive deeper into how DevSecOps can help embed security at each phase:
- Development Phase: Analyze code in small fragments so as to identify security gaps and quickly deliver them faster.
- Change Management phase: Improve speed and efficiency enables businesses to submit the changes faster for evaluation.
- Threat identification phase: Teams can identify potential emerging threats and stay responsive and cautious to its alterations.
- Security across CI/CD pipelines: Incorporate security aspect at every phase of CI/CD to develop a secured finished product.
Cultivate Best Practices for DevSecOps
Security aspect in DevSecOps is considered the panacea that brings speed, agility, and innovation to software-powered businesses. The following practices should be kept in mind while implementing DevSecOps:
- Practice Secure Coding
During development phase, secure coding practices reduce development vulnerabilities and security risk of crucial information. - Early Automation
Automated security tests throughout SDLC helps finding potential security issues in the code and look for vulnerabilities in real-time while the application runs. - Build guardrails and don’t be gatekeepers
Every stakeholder involved in the DevOps process is a contributor. Make security as everyone’s responsibility. - People Process and Technology
For a seamless workflow, an ideal combination of people, process, and technology play a vital role. ‘Security champions’ – people can get the DevSecOps right. ‘Consensus framework’ - the process strengthens the extent of security in development. While automation and configuration management, security as a code, and compliance scans – ‘the technology’ and reinforces the overall DevSecOps lifecycle.
Though DevSecOps is an antidote to many organizations. The barrier to its adoption still exists. The reason being - lack of awareness about DevSecOps, budget constraints, an unsolicited culture shift for employees and lack of clarity on how to approach.
Embrace ‘The DevSecOps culture’ with Cygnet
Developing a security aspect has been a gating factor for many businesses and has led the run on the chicken egg lines to incorporate security within their businesses.
Leverage Cygnet’s DevOps connoisseurs to achieve better security, accelerate development, ramp-up test cycles and deliver faster and quality builds. Explore more on how security aspects can turn tables favorably for your organization, talk to our experts at [email protected] or call us at +1-609-245-0971.
This article first appeared at Cygnet Infotech
“You can’t manage what you can’t (or don’t) measure”
First there came DevOps, in which processes between software development and IT teams were automated to speed up the building, testing, and release of software.
Then with bad actors using automated vulnerability-finding tools, eagle-eyed regulators closely watching for data breaches, and code breaking regularly, DevSecOps was next.
As John Yeoh, VP of research for the Cloud Security Alliance notes: “The security risks inherent in today’s intricate interactions between multiple technology layers, coupled with the globally interconnected and always-on nature of today’s applications, have been compounded by vulnerabilities lying dormant in systems, software, and hardware.
The result is a field ripe for picking by malicious parties across the world.”
Now in a new report the non-profit Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) emphasises six key pillars that must be considered by organisations, in a new DevSecOps guide.
Thriving enterprises have harnessed the power of DevOps for overcoming the bottlenecks of software development and deployment process.
The foundation of a rewarding DevOps strategy stands tall on four staunch pillars building momentum for competitive businesses with an additional edge.
Collaboration: Increased collaboration and communication between different departments of a single enterprise executing same project, same code, tool and responsibility.
Consider the case of the retail giant, Walmart.
Walmart Labs created an open source application, Hapi- a node.js framework for reusable logic instead of spending massive time on creating and executing the code again and again.
Automation of multiple tasks works on a rule-based concept where processes are categorized and handled as per domain-specificity or siloed operational or IT environments.
