Information technology (IT) has evolved significantly in the past decade or so, with many innovative systems being applied to businesses and organizations today. With this advancement came the increased emphasis needed on cybersecurity and IT security within every system, process, and application in an organization. As such, the concept of DevSecOps has been receiving more attention recently due to its promising potential and implications in the development process.
What exactly is this emerging framework, and why is it growing steadily in popularity? Get to know more about how organizations are shifting towards this mindset to create a more secure and agile work environment that can keep up with continuous advancements.
What is DevSecOps?
You may be more familiar with the traditional DevOps approach, which essentially combines development and operations functions to deliver more value to customers. The idea is to improve collaboration among software developers and IT operations teams to create more reliable applications and products. Generally, this framework has been the standard in the software development industry for over 20 years now as it ensures speedy delivery while still responding to users’ needs.
Nowadays, however, the DevSecOps model is becoming more appealing to organizations since it integrates security, an extremely important function, into the development process. Essentially, this framework suggests the need to include security in the DevOps pipeline to ensure that you implement appropriate security features right from the start. Hence, the addition of “Sec” into its name represents security.
Shift Towards the DevSecOps Framework
As more organizations recognize the importance of addressing and preventing security issues during the development process, the shift to a DevSecOps framework is becoming more evident. With the traditional DevOps approach, companies often did security at the final stage of the development life cycle, so more focus was placed on the actual development.
The problem with this model is that products would usually already be close to fully developed by the time they went through security. Implementing any drastic security measures at this point would entail spending a significant amount of time and resources to revise your code. Thus, the common practice would be to patch up issues without considering their implications.
Over time, however, cybersecurity has grown into a larger concern due to increasing attacks and threats on systems. As a result, more emphasis is being placed on security measures, thus creating the DevSecOps model. DevOps has proven to be successful in the past since it can speed up the development process, but as you release code, you also encounter vulnerabilities and risks that can threaten your security.
You can think of DevSecOps as a secure DevOps, where you think about security as you build your product and test its features. This way, you can eliminate threats every step of the way and minimize the overall risks. Today, more and more organizations are adopting the attitudinal shift to prevent the grave consequences of cyberattacks.
Best Practices with DevSecOps
If you plan to implement DevSecOps, you want to make sure you utilize the best practices to maximize your strategy’s benefits. To help you out, here are some top practices to use in your business:
- Automate
Automation is a key function in DevOps because you want to achieve speed while also ensuring the whole development process stays smooth. If you add security into the equation, the same principle applies. It will be best to automate your security tests and measures from the very beginning to accommodate the speed at which your teams are developing code.
- Choose the Right Tools
Given that DevSecOps is relatively young, many of the security tools that can be added to your pipeline are still developing. Thus, you must be selective when choosing what tools to use for your organization. Speed and accuracy will be the top characteristics to look out for since you need to keep up with the speed of development while still running accurate tests.
- Conduct Risk Assessments and Threat Modeling
Before changing up your process to include security in the development process, conduct a risk assessment to determine what threats, sensitivities, and vulnerabilities you should pay attention to. Doing a thorough assessment allows you to identify gaps and security issues in your infrastructure and design.
While threat modeling can be challenging and sometimes time-consuming to implement, it is extremely important because it exposes your designs to flaws that you may have overlooked. In a way, it pushes you to think from the point of view of an attacker, so you can take proactive steps to prevent a real attack from happening.
