Security at every DevOps Stage Best Practices for DevSecOps Strategy
A crucial piece of the puzzle is missing in the traditional DevOps system: an overarching security check. DevSecOps therefore focuses on the topic of security early in the development process. How does DevSecOps work and what needs to be considered?
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DevSecOps was designed so that there are no more threats or vulnerabilities in agile development and deployment.
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DevOps shortens the duration of application development by combining IT operations and software development. Therefore, however, security tests in these processes are rather postponed on the timeline, because it is feared that they will drastically slow down the creation process.
However, early security checks in the development process are crucial for highly effective security. Although many companies are aware of this circumstance, they do not adhere to it. On the other hand, it would be appropriate, especially for dynamic environments, to implement the latest security tools to ensure the security of applications without slowing down the life cycle of app development.
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This is where DevSecOps comes into play. The process improvement approach aims to create new solutions for the software development process in an agile framework. This means that seemingly contradictory objectives are guaranteed: those of security and rapid deployment. This is done in iterations, without slowing down the cycles. In this way, security problems can be detected as soon as they occur and not only after a threat appears in action.
This means that whenever DevSecOps is in play, companies with these tools are able to maintain the speed of their product releases, but significantly reduce the security risk and extremely reduce subsequent rework and other corrections. This is done through the use of automatable and early integrable security tools, especially during the code commit and pre-implementation phase.
Advantages of DevSecOps
Probably the most difficult aspect of integrating DevSecOps is to create a changed mindset and thus establish a new philosophy of application development throughout the company. At its core, DevSecOps is about taking security responsibility completely off the shoulders of security specialists and sharing it across different teams, especially with the development team. The implementation of SecOps can bring a number of advantages or synergies to the company. These include:
Better overview
The user always knows what is going on at every stage of the development process. The exchange of information and knowledge is optimized between the development teams, operations teams and security teams. Silo thinking and practices within the teams are dissolving.
Increased agility
DevSecOps complements the agile approach of methods such as Scrum and also promotes collaboration between the teams.
Traceability
If security has been implemented at every stage of the development process, the user can track all operations and show that everything that is created not only complies with the required security practices, but can also be checked by all participants.
Compliance
An important criterion especially for banks, fintech, healthcare and the public sector. If the application to be developed has to meet certain standards, DevSecOps provides the certainty that the product also meets the targeted requirements from the first day.
Approaches of possible DevSecOps technologies
Solutions for DevSecOps are currently still in a growth phase. One of the approaches is to simply adapt and modify existing security tools accordingly and apply them to the new DevOps technologies such as containers, cloud technology and serverless. Existing security solutions are adapted to new stacks.
* DevSecOps as a further development
An example of the adaptation of existing security solutions to the new DevOps technology is the provider Trend Micro, which has released new updates that promise more security for DevOps, but are still based on their existing product. These are security solutions for clouds and containers. For this, features such as automatic detection and protection of cloud workloads have been added to cloud providers. Another feature is integrated image scanning in DevOps pipelines with continuous threat and vulnerability scanning. The result: scalability and agility with deployment scripts and APIs for critical environments.
In addition, functions are offered that support the use of containers. Containers enable the smooth operation of applications in any environment, in the data center or in the cloud. They also help to deploy applications faster and more reliably. However, compromises between speed and environmental flexibility lead to more complexity in the infrastructure. This can be associated with serious security consequences if they are not addressed at an early stage. Trend Micro’s DevSecOps solutions help secure containers through continuous monitoring, which is integrated into the development process at an early stage.
* DevSecOps as a new development
CloudCheckr, on the other hand, offers new solutions that have integrated security configurations and activity monitoring for multi-cloud environments. They also contain a large number of automated configuration and security checks that strengthen cloud security. Furthermore, the offer includes best practice checks that enable companies to meet compliance requirements in various industries by automatically and regularly searching for common vulnerabilities.
In addition, tools analyze the logs and issue warnings if users in a cloud infrastructure do not comply with governance guidelines or other threats occur. Automations of this type are also a key feature for securing cloud infrastructures, as manual management is not practical given the enormous scale of cloud computing.
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DevOps and Security
eBook “DevOps and Security”
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