DevOps brings development and operations teams together without any segregation of functions to improve speed without compromising quality. DevOps methodology empowers teams to closely define, develop and release applications where everyone can have input which can be heard and acted upon quickly.
After uniting development and operations to ship more code faster, DevOps teams are set to handle security as another major obstacle to overcome. Contrary to DevOps processes, many current security controls are either not completed or managed as gates that DevOps teams must go through instead of integrating processes together.
“Gartner predicts that the number of teams adding security into DevOps will increase from 40% today to about 90% by 2022”
How does security fit in DevOps process?
If we think of security like a blanket that we use to cover and secure software, we want to make sure that it doesn’t have any holes that need to be repaired from the beginning to the end of development, The idea of an area that is vulnerable to attackers is called an attack surface and we want to keep that as small as possible and we also want to be sure that we address that as early as possible.
One way to do this is to shift left, or to start working on security earlier in the SDLC. By making security part of the software requirements at the earliest stages of development, it transfers throughout the entire cycle and brings it to the forefront.
“The only thing more dangerous than a developer is a developer conspiring with security- Gene Kim, DevOps Researcher and Author of The Phoenix Project”
Planning for Security in DevOps- Implementing DevSecOps:
Since DevOps doesn’t treat development cycles the same way as waterfall or agile. Without investing as much time or as many resources to planning phases for requirements and design, it will be a challenge to integrate security.
By developing a DevSecOps program, you can make sure that security is no longer a phase that you complete and forget, rather an ongoing strategy that we call a Continuous Application Security Program.
The goal of a Continuous Application Security Program is to understand where your DevSecOps program currently is, and where you want it to go.
For instance, if your current program deploys software with bugs, your goal could be to minimize or eliminate all software bugs before deployment.
Benefits of DevSecOps:
There are several benefits for teams that merge security into their DevOps processes. Understanding of threats that an application faces, teams can defend against the right risk at the right place to decrease data breaches, data loss, and various exposures. Although security experts can still monitor various aspects of software, a crucial tenet of DevOps is the ability to operate at scale and speed, free of arbitrary organizational and technical bottlenecks. The beneficial security tools fit in line with other items of the DevOps toolchain to provide continuous feedback at all times: as code is written, across the CI/CD pipeline, and to monitor and understand threats against the code as it runs in test and production environments.
At Detox Technologies, we have excellent security expertise along with robust experience building DevSecOps programs.