Nowadays, security is a massive challenge for organizations across various industries all over the world. We have witnessed a data breach where the TalkTalk website was hacked exposing the data of 156,959 accounts, and the website lost £77m after the attack. Many IT professionals distanced themselves from this brand after the incident.
Having said that, in the modern marketplace, high-velocity IT has laid the foundation for competitiveness in various fields. So, in order to survive, every business must transform itself into an innovative and agile software delivery machine that must stay secure and function swiftly at the same time. DevSecOps is the answer to integrating these different challenges that enterprises come across into an effective and coherent approach to the delivery of software. So, what actually is DevSecOps?
What is DevSecOps?
DevSecOps is a concept that involves unifying development, testing, deployment, and security into a single process in a software development life cycle. The major principle of DevSecOps is that security is an essential and integral element of DevOps.
Why DevSecOps?
Today, DevOps applications are evolving rapidly in terms of functionality, speed, and scale but are lacking in strong compliance and security. This is the reason why DevDecOps was introduced into the SDLC (software development lifecycle) to bring together security, operations, and development under one roof.
Best Practices of DevSecOps
In this section, we will have a look at the best practices that facilitate the smooth running of DevSecOps.
Let’s get started.
Strengthening security throughout the Software Delivery Pipeline
For effective security in the software delivery pipeline, we must include security personnel, ie., team members that make decisions about when to involve the security team. These members assist in examining the severity of security bugs for their team. They are responsible for tracking and coordinating a project’s security issues and reporting on the status of the project to the security advisor. The other responsibilities of these professionals include helping with testing and QA, helping with the development of Continuous Integration environments, and working with the application security team on mitigations strategies.
Fostering Staff Skills
A successful DevSecOps program invests in good professional training and development for its staff. To develop good security staff, the companies must offer new hires with the appropriate tools and training they require to accomplish their jobs well and contribute to the release of highly secure software.
Involving specialist security and DevOps training companies to increase staff awareness and staff is needed for maintaining consumer trust. Training must be rooted in organization standards, policies, goals for software security, and learning media must be flexible and tailored. Training can be instructor-led, computer-based, or a combination of both, and good training ensures the correct implementation of standards.
Integration of security into Agile development
The integration of security into Agile development enables companies to have a completely secure workstream across all the stages of the project development cycle. The requirement definition is the stage at which the integration of information security in the Agile universe must begin. This methodology is known as shifting security left and it minimizes the security implementation costs.
Implementation of Compliance
This is one of the best practice processes of DevSecOps and it doesn’t have to be paper-based exercise. We can create metadata that represents the compliance requirement and incorporate it into our assets. Security policy automation can also utilize this by tagging assets that can put into effect the security architecture that is needed. Just imagine the capability to respond to a security breach under the new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rules in 3 days. They can be continuously refreshed and automatically rolled out across your assets by codifying your compliance requirements.
Implementation of Technologies
The key to DevSecOps’ success is leveraging automation and utilizing orchestration to implement it. The auditing is made easier with the help of automation and orchestration through the usage of metadata. This makes decisions easier to achieve as they depend on repeatable processes and data points. Within configuration management, the usage of templates helps to implement traceability of each configuration/code. This makes it easier to determine the root cause of an issue.
Safe Coding Practices
All the existing coding standards must be continuously checked against the latest security recommendations. All the code changes must be validated against these recommendations and even a small change shouldn’t be overlooked. This is an important exercise and the advantages associated with such practices shouldn’t be underestimated.
The OWASP Top 10 is a powerful web application security awareness document and it is a great place to begin this review by converting the changes in the code into your QA testing with the help of automated testing to offer timely feedback to developers. With a rapid increase in the number of software development frameworks and techniques, Attack Driven Development outlines a process through which development teams can gain knowledge on the procedures, techniques, and tools for application security and software development in parallel.
Conclusion
DevSecOps is an approach that helps us to locate the security issues in the early stages of development rather than after a product’s release happens. This makes security repeatable and efficient. The errors can also be resolved quickly as different systems don’t possess different configurations. This blog has explained the best practices of DevSecOps and can you let us know which one among these are you using in your organization?
Disclaimer-
This blog is written by a guest blogger. The views, opinions, and positions expressed within this post are those of the author, they do not, however, represent the opinion or ideas of BDCC Global. The accuracy, completeness, and validity of any statements made within this article are not guaranteed. We accept no liability for any errors, omissions or representations. We are glad to provide such minds a platform to express and are thankful to them for their valued contributions and thoughtful insights on DevOps – which is what we believe in and treasure the most.
Savaram Ravindra
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- Boost Your DevSecOps By Following These Best Practices! - October 3, 2019