Are you ready for DevSecOps?

We all know how DevOps culture help projects to unify the development and operations for greater collaboration, faster feedback, reliability, scalability, faster delivery and increased customer satisfaction.

Wait, this is all good but what about Security? Projects may not be taking Security practices seriously from the beginning or assessments & testing is done manually or the whole thing is outsourced. Not giving enough importance to Security may cost high anytime. Security testing by a different team may also slow down the release process and can become a bottleneck in the flow. Hence it is a good idea to implement & ensure security along the way.

DevSecOps is an approach of unifying development, security and operations for all benefits of DevOps plus greater trust, increased transparency, reduced risks and peace of mind.

If a project is already doing DevOps, it’s easy to adopt DevSecOps philosophy, as they just need to wear Security hat also along the way.

For a successful DevSecOps implementation:

• Define Security Practices: Security of any software application needs to be planned and implemented from the early stages like Day 1 – this approach helps inculcating security practices at all the levels. Define how to implement & ensure security at all stages of the software development and deployment.
• Make Everyone Responsible: Everyone on the project plays a critical role in implementing/ensuring security. It is a good idea to include security specific expectations from each role on the project so that, it becomes their responsibility.
• Add Right Skills to the Team: Security is a specialized skill and a regular developer may need time to pick-up those concepts. It is highly recommended to add security specialists on the teams so that, they can help defining the secure coding standards, review the code in terms of security, analyze and fix vulnerabilities identified. Having experts help the teams to pick up that knowledge over time.
• Provide Security Training: Every person on the project should be given training on security guidelines and ways to tackle the issues. This way, you are giving them a sword to fight for security any time.
• Adopt Security Measures: Define measures at different stages of the journey to discuss, plan and implement security. These measure can be at the level of Data, Application, API, User Access, Infrastructure and Third-party software.
• Introduce Security Reviews: Along with regular reviews, make every change go through a security review as well to address the security issues at an early stage. Also encourage teams to submit small changes so that identifying the vulnerabilities is easy.
• Automate Security Testing: There are numerous tools available to validate code for the vulnerabilities and also run security test scripts. Integrating these tools and running the tests in the CICD pipeline will help speeding up the whole process.
• Plan Security Audits: It is always a good idea to have frequent audits in place to ensure teams are following the security processes defined and the project is adhering to industry guidelines and compliances. Preferably, these Audits should be done by an outsider team for accurate feedback.
• Continuously Monitor: Have a process in place to monitor the application after delivery to understand the issues raised to fine tune the DevSecOps process for improved results.

DevSecOps is an emerging concept, which can be adopted for any project, which needs emphasis on Security.