DevSecOps or DevOps Security combines development, security, and IT operations to automate security integration at every stage of the software development lifecycle. It increases the organization’s ability to deliver top-quality, secure, resilient products.
DevSecOps strategy allows businesses to scale growth and adopt security features to minimize remedial tasks. Companies must consider some advantages, challenges, and implementation techniques.
Advantages of DevSecOps
-
Offers Enhanced Security
DevOps security prevents the foundation of additional vulnerabilities caused due to persistent security issues.
-
Facilitates Rapid and Cost-Effective Software Delivery
Businesses require time to mitigate security issues. It causes massive downtime. Moreover, security issues in the live environment are costly to fix. DevSecOps security saves time and budget by addressing security code vulnerabilities early.
-
It Uses Automation
Businesses can achieve a high level of system security with the help of automation. DevSecOps evaluates the security checks across all the developmental stages. Additionally, iterative testing ensures the system code shifts to the next development phase with proper security.
-
Allows AI-Backed Threat Analysis
AI and ML approaches are used in advanced DevSecOps frameworks to simplify and streamline challenging DevSecOps activities. It gathers and analyzes OS logging to determine which software factors are vulnerable that the cyber-attacker might target.
AI can proactively suggest code alterations, additions, or architectural changes based on this information that helps identify code vulnerabilities. ML runs code additions or changes via finely tuned ML tools to determine how changes in the code will affect the applications.
-
Offers Streamlined Compliance Reporting
The reporting and auditing functions must ensure accuracy and consistency in displaying data. Reporting and auditing are challenging for security teams. It happens due to constantly changing data collection sources, lack of visibility, or manually configured tools that provide varying results.
Automatic compliance and auditing tools employ an effective holistic approach using a DevSecOps framework. These tools use ML and AI to learn the infrastructure architecture and conduct auditing scans on VMs or containers to verify the placement of proper security controls.
Businesses can move up the same toolset within the stack to determine software security controls like authentication, accounting, and authorization.
Challenges of DevSecOps
-
Lack of DevSecOps Knowledge and Resources
The team’s lack of understanding of DevSecOps is a common challenge. The company’s security infrastructure takes massive hits when the unit is unaware of the good DevSecOps practices and compliances.
-
Missing Business Logic Vulnerabilities
Business logic vulnerabilities are implementation and design mistakes that enable attackers to steal data or achieve a malicious goal. Moreover, as businesses develop rapidly, system vulnerabilities are missed. These flaws are harder to detect by DevSecOps.
-
Tool Integration
The toolkit required for DevSecOps security analysis can make it hard for businesses to choose the best tools. Hence, it also makes it challenging for developers to set up tool integration and gather security testing results from various tools.
How Can Businesses Implement DevSecOps?
-
Design and Coding
The design blueprint must have all the insights about the business’ security posture. Since every action is significant in an agile DevSecOps environment, it must be detailed security testing steps. These documents must include specialized use cases that might pose potential security risks.
Businesses must, for example, manage the authentication and APIs to minimize an attack. The document must contain enumerated protection insights like credential expiry and encryption details.
Additionally, businesses must follow best coding practices to avoid security flaws in code. For instance, input sanitization minimizes the chances of loopholes in the codes. The more traditional coding methods are followed, the better. These practices eliminate the need to recheck the code for security gaps.
-
Security and DevOps Tool Integration
DevSecOps need robust automation tools to enhance the processes. Therefore, the security verification tools must efficiently integrate with the current tools. It supports the streamlined integration of security tests across the recent deployment and development processes, offering better monitoring solutions to maintain the live environment.
-
Align the Development Workflow with Security Practices
When embedding security practices with the development teams, businesses must ensure they are flexible with the changing security practices. Flexibility is crucial since it allows companies to resonate with the development workflow without hindering the security requirements.
At the same time, businesses must use the security budget to realign the development workflow. They must also use the funding for better in-demand training to help the team succeed in DevSecOps.
-
Embrace Automation
Since releases are rapid, a manual code review for every release overwhelms the team. Therefore, businesses must automate security checks. They must use automation to minimize technical overheads that help teams to find and correct the errors before they affect the system.
Simultaneously, businesses can ensure that the product passes through each stage of the developmental cycle with robust policies and automated security tests.
Also Read: Why AI is Imperative for Building a Robust Zero-Trust Strategy?
-
Evaluate Performance and Progress
Efficient evaluation of performance and progress is essential for DevSecOps implementation. It allows businesses to understand how well the strategy is progressing. Once companies implement DevSecOps, they must use performance KPIs to determine the success of the implementation. Here are a few metrics businesses must measure-
Deployment frequency of Application– It shows how rapidly the strategy supports the software development processes.
Lead time- Measures the time between code deployment and commit, displaying the speed of the development process. The minimal the time, the maximum the efficiency.
Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR)- It allows businesses to determine the average time used to recover from failure as it measures the time between complete restoration and a failed deployment. The lower the MTTR, the quicker the recovery.
Customer Ticket Volume allows businesses to measure client and customer satisfaction levels and flags bugs and defects.
Failure Rate Changes- These metrics allow businesses to determine the percentage of post-production hotfixes and code changes. Additionally, the failed production deployment percentages indicate the deployment processes’ efficiency.
Defect Escape Rate- This tracks the frequency of defects accumulating in production. Higher defect rates indicate testing issues.
For more such updates follow us on Google News ITsecuritywire News. Please subscribe to our Newsletter for more updates.
