What is DevSecOps and How Businesses Can Implement It Successfully?

As the digital world evolves rapidly, businesses are compelled to continuously adapt to stay competitive. The coronavirus pandemic, indeed, proved that it is not the strongest that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the businesses that are more adaptable to change. And, in the need of the hour, DevOps has emerged as the right respite to survive and thrive amid the crisis. Courtesy of its enticing benefits such as improved collaboration, faster software delivery, enhanced quality, and high customer satisfaction. DevOps makes this possible by bridging the gap between the business, development, and operations teams and applying automated processes across the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

The DevOps Security Lax

Though DevOps promises potential benefits, the transformation journey is easier said than done. While organizations are proactively jumping on the DevOps bandwagon to dole our applications at a faster pace, they failed to realize DevOps’ full potential. Security inadvertently played the spoilsport here.

The traditional security approaches and manual controls have hampered businesses from realizing speed to market. Indeed, legacy security practices are often perceived as impediments to continuous software delivery. This lack of security hygiene spawned insecure code, software vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and many more, pushing the businesses into the crosshairs of cybercriminals.

The Rise of DevSecOps

Taking due cognizance of this DevOps-security challenge, many forward-thinking enterprises have started integrating robust security practices into each phase of their DevOps pipeline. This approach is commonly known as DevSecOps. When implemented strategically, DevSecOps helps enhance security and reduce compliance issues, while boosting quality and productivity. Prominently, it eliminates the bottlenecks created by the traditional security practices in the DevOps pipelines, thus unleashing the DevOps’ true potential.

Before we deep dive into how businesses can successfully adopt DevSecOps, let’s see how it is different from DevOps:

DevOps Vs DevSecOps: What’s the Real Difference?

While DevOps is about the seamless integration of developers and operations team, DevSecOps is all about integrating security into DevOps processes. Though the two methodologies are not mutually exclusive, they do have different objectives. Businesses must have a proper understanding of both these methodologies to exploit the best of both worlds. Read on…

Comparison element	DevOps	DevSecOps
Philosophy	It is a new way of working that transforms and optimizes the entire software delivery lifecycle.	It is a new way of approaching IT security with an ‘everyone is responsible for security’ mindset.
Collaboration	Bridges gap between Dev and Ops teams.	Bridges gap between Dev, Ops, and Security teams.
Purpose	To improve the flow from software ideation to delivery by enabling a collaborative environment.	To incorporate security awareness into the whole process of delivering value from software ideation to implementation, delivery, and monitoring.
Primary Objective	To develop and deploy products at a faster pace	To deliver high-quality products swiftly and securely.
Practices	DevOps processes involve practices like: Ø  Continuous Integration (CI) Ø  Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment (CD) Ø  Microservices Ø  Infrastructure as Code (IaC)	Along with DevOps practices, DevSecOps involves some additional practices like: Ø  Automated security testing Ø  Threat modeling Ø  Common weaknesses enumeration (CWE) Ø  Incident Management
Automation	DevOps leverages automation for releasing codes into higher environments	In DevSecOps, automation is used for security testing to test all new developments on regular basis and in an automated manner.
Tools	Some of the top DevOps tools are: Ø  Slack Ø  Jenkins Ø  Docker Ø  Ansible Ø  Git Ø  Kubernetes Ø  Puppet Ø  Chef Ø  Phantom Ø  Vagrant	Some of the top DevSecOps tools are: Ø  Acunetix Ø  Aqua Security Ø  Codacy Ø  SonarQube Ø  Checkmarx Ø  Notary Ø  ThreatModeler Ø  WhiteSource Ø  Logz Ø  Contrast security
Business benefits	DevOps benefits include: Ø  Increased frequency of deployments and releases Ø  Faster time to market Ø  High product quality Ø  Bettered operational reliability Ø  Improved Mean Time to Recover (MTTR) Ø  Enhanced team collaboration	DevSecOps benefits include: Ø  Efficient software delivery Ø  Automated security Ø  Identify & patch vulnerabilities quickly Ø  Swift response to security incidents Ø  Improved security compliance Ø  High observability and traceability

Best Practices for DevSecOps Adoption: How to Seamlessly Integrate Security into DevOps

As a natural extension of DevOps methodology, DevSecOps integrates security into the software development lifecycle and automates the security tasks. The security integration must be as seamless and as transparent as possible, so the agility or speed of software development and delivery will not be hampered. Though it sounds easy, a hasty approach may make it a tough row to hoe. So, how can a business avoid this?

Here are the DevSecOps best practices that enable business to successful adopt DevSecOps:

The human factor is the weakest link of the software development lifecycle. So, businesses must consider the human factor as the starting point for DevSecOps implementation. Let’s delve deep:

1. Eradicate the Silos

The first and foremost step in DevSecOps implementation is changing the way the security team integrates with the business, development, and operations teams. In DevOps methodology, the security team is considered as a separate entity and used to work in silos. Now is the time for the organization to break down the barriers and silos to integrate Dev, Ops, and Security teams. To do so, businesses must imbibe security practices and processes across the software delivery pipeline (design, development, delivery, operations, and support stages). Governance and cybersecurity measures such as code review, identity and access management, firewalls, configuration, and vulnerability management must be incorporated into the DevOps workflow while ensuring minimal disruptions to the SDLC.

2. Educate the Employees

Training and upskilling the in-house employees is paramount for any successful DevSecOps adoption. Organizations must introduce training programs to foster and develop good cybersecurity hygiene among the employees. The learning media must be customized and flexible to enable easy learning.

3. Embed the Culture

Introducing DevSecOps processes and technologies is not enough for the real DevSecOps adoption as the company’s culture inertia bogs down the transformation. At its core, DevSecOps survives and thrives on a culture and a mindset in which various teams have a common objective of continuous security.

In a bid to imbibe the DevSecOps culture, start small with a few committed and self-motivated teams by aligning them to the strategic goals of DevSecOps initiatives. These initiatives pave the way for these teams to ingrain DevSecOps culture into everyday functions while balancing security, speed, and scale. Once these pilot teams successfully adopt DevSecOps culture and start realizing concrete benefits, other teams can be roped into the culture.

4. Enable Security Built-in

While security integration sounds logically simple, it’s easier said than done. Lack of proper understanding and tooling or processes is one of the prime challenges that teams face in building security into the software development processes. Empowering teams with proper tools and technologies is vital to embed security into SDLC.

Shifting security to the left of the SDLC, even before code development, helps in realizing a fully secure work stream through every single stage of the project development cycle. Organizations can start with security practices such as threat modeling, Common Weaknesses Enumeration (CWE), and incident

management to develop the course for the security requirements and controls to be implemented during the DevOps pipeline. Simultaneously, the developers must be trained on writing secure code and fixing security issues. Empower the Dev team with security tools such as IDE-based scanners to find insecure code within the developer’s workstation and fix them early.

5. Ensure Compliance

Staying compliant with the evolving industry standards is imperative to avoid hefty fines and loss of brand reputation during any unexpected circumstances. Hammer our metadata addressing the compliance requirements and integrate it into the processes. Embed compliance best practices, policies, and tools into each phase of your development lifecycle. This enables teams to proactively assess whether the code commits & revisions are adhering to the enterprise compliance framework or IT policies.

6. Enable Automation

Automation helps organizations strike the right balance between security, speed, and scale. DevOps focuses on automation and the same holds for DevSecOps. Leverage automated code scanning and automated application security testing throughout the software development lifecycle to enable more excellent coverage, consistency, and predictable processes. This ensures that incorporated software dependencies are appropriately patched, and confirms that software passes security checks. Additionally, automated testing can secure code with static and dynamic analysis before the final update is released to production.

Looking to Embark on the DevSecOps Transformation Journey?

Continuum Innovations Can Help!

As a leading DevSecOps consulting services provider, Continuum Innovations brings in extensive industry expertise to help businesses harness the true potential of DevSecOps methodology. Whether you are an SMB or a Fortune 500 company, we have DevSecOps platforms and processes tailored to your specific business needs. Let’s join forces and develop and deliver high-quality products swiftly and securely.

Let’s Collaborate!