Introduction to DevSecOps
Before defining DevSecOps or DevSecOps Tools, let’s discuss little about DevOps from where this term originated.
Brief About DevOps
DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.
What is DevSecOps?
SecOps (Security + Operations) is a movement created to facilitate collaboration between IT security and operations teams and integrate the technology and processes they use to keep systems and data secure — all in an effort to reduce risk and improve business agility.
Importance of DevSecOps
In recent years, we have seen that cyber-attacks have increased many folds, and even the most prepared organizations can’t deny the risk of undergoing a cyber-attack. It came into notice in the past few days that zero-day attacks compromised more than 65% of the total attacks, and the threats to cloud-based applications have significantly increased, which were previously negligible as more organizations are shifting towards cloud environments.
Incorporating security is essential to the DevOps process as security can no longer be neglected or underestimated. Further, this increased level of threat has given rise to DevSecOps.
Benefits of DevOps Security
DevSecOps and DevSecOps Tools aim at integrating security principles and standards in the DevOps cycle, i.e., implementing security controls at each level of the DevOps cycle, especially in the early stages of the software development lifecycle. It also helps create a ‘ Security as Code’ approach by ensuring flexible collaboration between security teams and release engineers.
- Minimize vulnerabilities in applications.
- Helps to implement compliance into the delivery pipeline from day one.
- Maintain and ensure compliance.
- Provides the ability to respond to changes rapidly.
- Identify vulnerabilities in the early stages of the software development lifecycle.
- Offers more speed and agility to security teams.
- Helps to build a trustful relationship with organizations.
- Increase observability.
- Increase traceability.
Some of the other benefits of adopting DevSecOps are
- Reduction of expenses and Delivery rate increases.
- Security, Monitoring, Deployment check, and notifying systems from the beginning.
- It supports openness and Transparency right from the start of development.
- Secure by Design and the ability to measure.
- Faster Speed of recovery in the case of a security incident.
- Improving Overall Security by enabling Immutable infrastructure which further involves security automation.
How DevSecOps Works?
The fundamental goal of DevSecOps is to secure the application by making security and operations team members practicing and co-operating with development from the very beginning of a project. Below is the overview of its work:
Analysis of infrastructure and environments to get the idea of challenges involves –
- Applications and APIs.
- Libraries and Frameworks.
- Container and Cloud.
- Network.
- Secure: After analyzing, secure it, and choose the right path according to culture.
- Automate Security Testing and verify it.
- Detect Attacks and prevent Exploits, i.e. defend the system.
How to Adopt DevSecOps?
Nowadays the greatest obstacle to DevSecOps is culture, not technology. Traditionally, security teams and dev teams work separately. To successfully move to a DevSecOps methodology, follow the DevOps methodology in both Sec. and Dev. Teams must make application security an integrated strategy and continue to encourage security awareness.
Effective ways to adopt it:
- Automate the process as much as possible.
- Follow the DevOps methodology.
- Train to code securely.
- Evaluation of current security measures and concluding what to do to overcome problems.
- Integrate the security to DevSecOps.
- By adopting the right DevSecOps tools.
- Monitoring Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.
- Analyze code and do a vulnerability assessment.
- Mandatory security at every stage.
Define a model that the organizations can adapt to implement DevSecOps. For example which one of the below models is better for organizations –
- Static Analysis Security Testing (SAST).
- Dynamic Analysis Security Testing (DAST).
- Software Composition Analysis (SCA).
- Container security.
How to know whether the adoption of DevSecOps is successful or not? Successful Adoption of DevSecOps depends upon –
- Detection of threats, security defects, and flaws.
- Deployment frequency.
- Meantime to their repair and recovery.
- Lead time.
- Test coverage
Why DevSecOps Matters?
Due to the joint venture of the development and operation team DevSecOps is important and other reasons are listed below.
- Focus on the application’s security from the beginning.
- It finds vulnerabilities and encourages practitioners to build security processes.
- It seeks to provide better results at greater speed same as DevOps.
- Reducing vulnerabilities, and increases code coverage and automation.
Best uses of DevSecOps
- Integrate security throughout the DevOps process.
- To train on secure coding.
- Automate the whole pipeline from Continuous Integration to Continuous Deployment.
- Choose the appropriate tools for the security check.
- To move to Git as a single source of truth.
- To know code dependencies.
- Use an analytics-driven SIEM platform.
Top DevSecOps Integration Tools
Some DevSecOps tools to integrate throughout DevOps Pipeline
- ThreatModeler
- Contrast Security
- Continuum Security
- Elastalert
- Kibana and Grafana
For More information, Contact Teamitek
if your company needs Experienced DevOps professionals please contact us at, victor@teamitek.com