What is DevSecOps, and Why Should You Care About It?

Quick Summary: Did you know that 80% of data breaches involve insider threats? DevSecOps, a revolutionary approach in software development, offers a best-fit solution for this. By integrating security and agility into every stage of the development lifecycle, DevSecOps ensures that your applications are more resilient and protected against cyber threats. Read on to discover why DevSecOps is essential for businesses of all sizes in this comprehensive guide.

With the rise of DevOps methodologies and DevOps implementation, many industries have gained a more agile approach to development life cycles, which has helped them release and deploy software quickly.

Moreover, the security risks under traditional methods have led development teams to experience delays in production release. Therefore, organizations have shifted their paradigm to DevSecOps to address this issue.

Now, the question is - What do you know about DevSecOps? As you might have tried to connect some dots from the name itself, DevSecOps is the combination of DevOps and Security.

Let’s not move your sight from this read as we move on to the next part – what is DevSecOps, the benefits of DevSecOps, DevSecOps tools, the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps, and many other interesting areas.

Let’s understand the DevSecOps definition first.

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What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps introduces security earlier in the application development life cycle, thus bringing security closer to IT and minimizing vulnerabilities

DevSecOps is an approach that provides security to the existing DevOps methodology, ensuring fewer vulnerabilities. This method embraces the traditional development lifecycle approach by incorporating security protocols into every step of the software development lifecycle process. Therefore, development teams handle security concerns promptly rather than waiting until the development cycle to address them.

DevSecOps is still new and gaining popularity gradually. Hence, it may take some time to gain acceptance and implementation from organizations.

Previously, software releases were a major concern (now, DevOps shortened). In such situations, having a security team check and verify the code in production wastes time and contradicts the ideas of fast and agile DevOps. Only a completely automated software development process allows for secure and rapid product deployment. Hence, DevSecOps became a need for organizations, enabling them to innovate securely while remaining agile.

In a nutshell, DevSecOps principles extend the DevOps approach that incorporates the best security practices into every development phase. The DevSecOps technique fosters a culture of 'Security as Code,' with transparent communication between the development teams and security teams.

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What are SecDevOps and DevOpsSec?

DevSecOps, SecDevOps, and DevOpsSec - we find these terminologies similar at first glance. Right? But each of these is a separate entity. Let’s understand them one by:

i) DevSecOps

Security is considered in the DevSecOps approach; however, it is not the top concern. DevOps teams hardly have the tools on their hands to deploy security controls for every level. Here, the organization’s security teams often make their appearance late to address the security threats.

ii) DevOpsSec

As the name suggests – DevOpsSec, security is concerned at the end of the development process. The DevOps team builds and deploys the app first, and then information security plugs in any security gaps.

However, if you aim to ensure tight security of the product, this idea (having weak security is preferable than no security) is meaningless.

iii) SecDevOps

SecDevOps method integrates a security approach into the continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD), including security considerations before development starts and throughout the development process.

Why is DevSecOps Important?

As we know, cyber-attacks have increased rapidly in recent days. And even the renowned organizations can’t deny the fact that they were being targeted too. In addition, zero-day attacks compromised more than 65% of the total attacks, and the risks to cloud-based apps have increased as many organizations migrate to cloud environments.

DevSecOps is very important because it not only creates concern about your app’s security and development environment but it also makes them secure and safer. It fosters communication between developer teams and security masters. Also, it integrates security into the development process directly. DevSecOps unites everyone around the fundamental principle that all code must be secure throughout the development cycle.

By following a few basic tactics, DevSecOps can reduce the potential threats to your business and your customers:

• Writing secure code and sharing the best practices across development teams. This fosters a more collaborative and transparent environment where everyone is accountable for security risks.

• Detecting and fixing flaws earlier in the life cycle. Security testing is typically done at the end of the development process – during staging or user acceptance testing, or pre-production development. When security issues are identified late, developers are forced to fix or rewrite code. This actually increases the time of production.

• Adding a security plugin to the integrated development environment (IDE). Developers can use this to check for security issues while coding. There are many other solutions, such as the OWASP SAST plugin and the Snyk IDE Plugin. This same IDE will reduce the onboarding time and enhance collaboration.

Benefits of DevSecOps

Despite the many benefits of DevSecOps, many organizations still feel hesitant to implement it. Let's take a closer look at the advantages of DevSecOps implementation:

• Increased delivery rates and reduced expenses
• Supports transparency from the beginning of the development
• Faster recovery speed during any security incident
• Designed securely and the ability to measure
• Analyzing, security, deployment check, and notifying systems from the beginning
• Improves overall security by enabling immutable infrastructure, involving security automation further
• A greater ROI in the existing security infrastructure of an organization
• Better communication and collaboration between teams
• Better opportunities for testing and automated builds

How DevSecOps Works?

The primary goal of DevSecOps is to secure the product or application for an organization with the best development approach from the beginning.

The following is a summary of its work: Analysis of infrastructure and surroundings is required to obtain the challenges involved.

• Applications and APIs
• Libraries and Frameworks
• Container and Cloud
• Network
• Secure it after analyzing it and deciding on the best path based on your culture.
• Automate and validate security testing.
• Detect attacks and prevent exploits

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DevSecOps Best Practices

Here are some of the important factors that play a vital role in DevSecOps implementation.

Shift Left Testing

Shift left is one type of testing approach that helps secure your application initially instead of waiting until the final stages of the life cycle. The primary advantage of leveraging the shift-left approach is to identify potential risks and resolve them in a short time. As a result, it becomes the best practice to save costs while finding errors at an early stage.

The common DevSecOps challenge that every developer faces is that shifting left may temporarily trouble your current DevOps process workflow. However, it’s not easy to overcome this issue, but it’s undoubtedly the best DevSecOps practice for DevSecOps implementation.

Secure Coding

The secure coding practices will lead to developer software that is highly resistant to threats and cyber-attacks. Various software security threats, such as breaching a company's sensitive data, might occur if secure coding practices are not implemented. As a result, your engineers must be capable of implementing secure coding practices - even if it means investing cost and time. Following the standard and secured coding practices is also a plus point as it aids developers in writing clean code.

Automation

Automation is a primary key characteristic in DevSecOps, just like the same in DevOps. Security automation is essential to stay updated with your code delivery in a CI/CD method for better security. This turns out to be true in many large organizations, where developers deploy different code versions many times a day.

While automating security testing, you need to be more careful and thoughtful. It might be terrible to use the wrong automated tools for the wrong tasks. Hence, Static Application Security Testing (SAST) tools are generally preferred to examine potential risks throughout the development cycle without any interruptions. If you want your company's products to flourish, you must choose a proper and suitable security automation tool.

Culture: Process, Users, and Technology

Three major factors like process, users, and technology have played an important role in making DevSecOps successful.

a) Process

The process is made up of different components. Hence, documentation and standardized workflow are the most important aspects. Typically, many development teams will take different processes ahead. However, DevSecOps argues for defining and executing processes for better development security.

b) Users

There will not be any possibility of a better DevSecOps environment if the management or team members are least interested in DevSecOps implementation. It could be a tedious task to convince the management.

However, the fact that high-profile data breaches occur due to insufficient security could support your case. You'll need a team of professionals and "security masters" to configure your DevSecOps correctly.

c) Technology

Users are now able to perform DevSecOps processes with the help of different DevSecOps tools and technologies. In fact, there are various DevSecOps tools like automated compliance scans, Security as Code, host hardening, automation, and configuration management available in the market.

Enhance Continuous Integration with DevOps Security

DevOps teams use cutting-edge DevOps technologies and tools such as Continuous Integration (CI) to automate various phases of the software development cycle, like building and testing. This could be a monotonous job that every developer has to follow with each release.

Integrating security measures into Continuous Integration processes and technologies guarantees that issues are identified before builds are validated for Continuous Delivery (CD). CI also reduces the amount of time spent on each iteration.

Using static application security testing (SAST) on daily builds, for example, can ensure that you're just finding out for items of interest in the code modifications that were committed on that given day.

To guarantee that security concerns are identified early in the development cycle, DevSecOps teams should deploy vulnerability assessment scanning technologies. For this form of testing, they can use pre-production systems.

How to Implement DevSecOps?

The implementation of DevSecOps is a long process. While there’s not any strict roadmap to serve the best DevSecOps implementation, we have figured out the important steps to implement DevSecOps.

Planning and Development

Planning is the initial phase for successful implementation. Here, the professional teams must work together to create acceptance test criteria, threat models, and user designs. Just feature-based information will not suffice.

Once you have made the plan, the next step would be – development. It’s a good method to fetch data from various sources to guide teams in the right direction. At this time, having a code review mechanism may turn out to be beneficial as it offers uniformity, which is a special feature of DevSecOps.

Building and Testing

Let’s move on to the next step – building. Here, automated tools combine the source code into machine code with a build script. However, build automation tools offer many features. They have a plethora of plugins, libraries, and UIs to choose from. Some developers can automatically define and replace any libraries that are not secured with new ones.

The next phase is testing. The pipeline is infused with solid testing standards in testing because of the comprehensive automated testing framework.

Deployment and Operation

Infrastructure as Code tools are commonly used to deploy the product since they help with process automation and faster software delivery.

Operation is another critical step we should consider for DevSecOps implementation. Here, the operation team has responsibility for routine maintenance. And zero-day exploits become a nightmare for them. As a result, they should monitor them on time. DevSecOps can use IaC tools to secure the organization's app and infrastructure efficiently, preventing human errors.

Monitoring and Scaling

The continuous monitoring tools play an important role in the development process, ensuring security systems work properly.

Scaling is important too in every business process. This helps organizations not to waste any resources on data center maintenance because of the virtualization development. Rather, they can extend the IT infrastructure to handle any security risks.

Well, you have to follow some fundamental processes to implement DevSecOps. Your ideation may have some additional steps, depending on the size of the project and its complexity.

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Best Uses of DevSecOps

• To know code dependencies and follow a secure coding approach
• Use an analytics-oriented SIEM platform
• Security integration at every step of the DevOps process
• To move to Git as a single source of truth
• Select the right DevSecOps tools for the security check
• Automate the whole pipeline from CI to CD

Top 5 DevSecOps Tools to Integrate

Here are the best 5 DevSecOps tools to integrate.

• ThreatModeler
• Contrast Security
• Continuum Security
• Elastalert
• Kibana and Grafana

DevSecOps: Security + Agility + Radixweb

DevSecOps means automating and integrating security throughout the development process so that you can produce more secure code in a short time. Therefore, you have to encourage every team member to implement DevSecOps by changing their mindsets. Furthermore, every developer should come together to take the responsibility to produce secure and compliant code using tools and implement safety measures into CI/CD pipelines.

The benefits (technical and business ones) your organization can get from DevSecOps implementation are very promising. Although there will undoubtedly be some loopholes when you first initiate, DevSecOps can be extremely beneficial to your organization in the long term. Hence, working with a prominent DevOps development company like Radixweb can make all the difference to your organization with DevSecOps implementation.