DevSecOps. What? Why? How? - The Pillars

Software development processes have developed to meet the demands and pace of business. DevOps approaches have recently offered software developers and operations teams with a faster and more efficient manner of developing code. However, effective DevOps approaches revealed a new bottleneck, relegating security to the tail end of application development and administration.

Embracing DevSecOps necessitates a cultural shift, the evolution of current procedures, the use of contemporary platform capabilities, and the strengthening of governance. Here are six pillars to integrate security with your DevOps practices.

Successful DevSecOps adoption requires a thoughtful, intentional blend of cross-team collaboration, a security first culture, and cutting edge technology.

This bottleneck is one of the reasons why it might take up to 6 months for an enterprise to discover a security vulnerability, which can be quite costly. According to NIST, the cost of resolving a security flaw in production may be up to 60 times more than the cost of fixing it during the development stage. According to research, incorporating security early in application development and management, or shifting left, is a primary investment emphasis for digital leaders. DevSecOps is the next natural progression of the DevOps technique, incorporating security into their pipelines and exploiting new platform capabilities.

Embracing DevSecOps necessitates a cultural shift, the evolution of current procedures, the use of contemporary platform capabilities, and the strengthening of governance.

Here are the Pillars of the DevSecOps.

Culture Shift

DevSecOps begins with people. It is not "implemented," it is embraced. And, in order for this to happen, your business must embrace a DevSecOps culture while "living and breathing" it, which requires executive buy-in. It requires the whole organisation, not just the IT staff, product teams, and project managers, to be successful.

Thus the most important aspect of the DevSecOps adoption process is culture-shift. As a result, it is advised to begin with people, then move on to procedures, and last to technology. If your staff are uninterested in adopting new technologies, your heavy investment in technology will fail.

People must adopt a security attitude on a constant basis, which necessitates a culture transformation. DevSecOps is built on a shared security concept in which teams must work together. Security is considered as a community duty under this approach, rather than the responsibility of any one team. This does not negate the need for professional security and infrastructure experts.

Shift Security Left

There’s much to consider, including modern tooling, adoption of best practises, and buy-in across the enterprise. It all starts with developers incorporating security scans into their CI/CD workflows. These continuous security scans put organisations in a position to safeguard apps by design and reduce vulnerabilities.

Continuous assessments and compliance checks are the quickest way to achieve an optimal security posture. This occurs at several levels, ranging from code analysis through unit testing of security features. Here are some fundamental principles for doing effective continuous assessments are :

• Vulnerabilities and Exposure Hunting
• Early Detection
• Compliance Scanning
• Automation
• Enhanced Traceability
• Metrics Reporting

Everything-as-Code

An everything-as-code strategy, like DevOps, offers more efficient operations by standardising software development techniques. An everything-as-code approach to development codifies parts of development such as infrastructure, schema, and pipelines, allowing you to control governance using policy files rather than manual procedures. Consider it the ideological application of an application development strategy to other components of IT to guarantee that best practises are created and followed with the least amount of work.

Most businesses use Everything-as-Code to relieve their employees of manual management. Manual and time-consuming effort slows down your business and cannot deliver the necessary efficiency, scalability, and testing for contemporary security.

The following are some implementation approaches that ease the pain points of manual IT administration.

Infrastructure-as-Code

Many businesses begin their journey to everything-as-code by implementing infrastructure-as-code (IaC), which allows them to control their IT infrastructure using configuration files. The IaC enables you to develop, alter, and enhance secure infrastructure in a predictable manner.

Configuration-as-Code

The everything-as-code approach extends beyond your infrastructure. Configuration-as-code (CaC) extends this concept by managing configuration resources as well. Finally, CaC enables server configurations to be duplicated between environments without the need for human interaction.

Pipeline-as-Code

Pipeline-as-Code(PaC) is considered to be an application deployment blueprint. This blueprint summarises all of the steps required to develop and deploy secure apps. This blueprint summarizes all of the steps required to develop and deploy secure apps. With all of these characteristics now specified "as-code," it allows the enforcement and delivery if secure apps at scale for the businesses.

Security Automation

Because the regulatory landscape and the software it regulates are continually evolving, an automated approach to policy compliance is required.

Security Compliance Monitoring policies must be established that are related to the enterprise's regulatory and compliance requirements, industry standards, and organisational goals, so that security compliance is never called into question during an audit. When implemented appropriately, the policies provide DevSecOps with a set of controls that ensure security vulnerabilities are monitored and rectified at every level of the process.

Here are the measures an enterprise can take to achieve continuous compliance through policy automation:

Determine Policy Set

The first step in the process is determining which policies are necessary. Specific compliance requirements are applied on businesses based on their respective sector. Check for compliance frameworks such as CIS, ISO27001, and PCI-DSS in the cloud infrastructure.

Governance-as-Code Adoption

The second step is to ensure that the policies are version controlled and saved in a code repository. By sustaining governance in automated methods that do not jeopardise agility. It improves the approach by allowing you to see your prior successes and mistakes.

Shift-Left Policing

Once the policies are written in code, teams throughout the company can understand, validate, and test them against code much earlier in the software lifecycle. This implies that your teams may verify policies even before a pull request is closed and rectify at the earliest possible stage.

 Leveraging the Compliance Monitoring Tools

The next stage is to monitor and observe the organization's compliance status utilising Compliance Monitoring Tools, which give real-time compliance telemetry. This is incredibly useful if an auditor wishes to assess the present status of Enterprise's Cloud Infrastructure.

Threat Modelling

Traditionally, threat modelling has been considered an application design task. However, methods that employ testing and post-deployment behaviour to feed threat modelling analyses are developing. In summary, threat modelling has expanded beyond application design and into operations. As a result, DevSecOps may benefit from complete threat modelling at all stages.

 According to the classic development model, development activities flow downstream, finally leading to operations. When a product is "operationalized," feedback is gathered and returned to development. Operations has no effect on the future edition of a software product.

DevSecOps refers to operations that take place throughout the development process. That indicates that both operations and security have an impact on the current version of the programme. Instead of resolving weaknesses after deployment, DevSecOps integrate operations from the start.

The first step in putting any change into action is to clearly identify the goals.

The purpose of threat modelling is to create secure and functioning software. Determining what "safe and functioning software" truly entails is a large problem in and of itself. Regardless of how "safe" and "functional" are defined, each company need a set of clearly stated design goals for its software. Every action must directly promote one of the declared aims of the organisation.

Unfortunately, security is frequently reactive. Using threat modelling brings security earlier in the design phase, making it more proactive. To get there, you must first establish your threat modelling objectives, then select a strategy and begin implementing it.

Monitoring

Effective Monitoring strategies relies on following factor such as Carefully Collecting, Structuring Logs Data, Combining with Threat Intelligence for Proactive Security.

Ideally, capture the data and organize it carefully. Based on potential targets, refine the log sourcing. Consider the ‘signal-to-noise’ ratio when collecting data from various sources. Use parameters to determine the baseline for any application. Leveraging the Machine-Driven monitoring and analysis can be setup by providing applications behaviour baselines to detect meaning statistics. Incorporating advanced analytics and machine learning aids in detecting any unexpected behaviour that may indicate a breach. Proactive Security by integrating Alerts with Threat Intelligence collected from several sources concerning new and current threats allows for a better knowledge of threat capabilities, IOCs (Indicators of Compromise), and the tactics, methods, procedures (TTPs), and mitigation controls to be used against it.