DevSecOps: The New Security Focused Enhancement to DevOps Approach by Nathan McKinley
In recent years, we have seen the IT infrastructure to undergo massive changes. DevSecOps approach has been at the forefront of these changes. By combining both the development and operations team, DevOps helped to scale up and speed up the process. Apart from boosting efficiency and speed, this has played a significant role in strengthening stability. DevOps approach has been particularly beneficial for apps releasing features frequently.
In spite of all these positive aspects, the security aspect of an app has largely remained underserved. This is why DevSecOps has emerged as the most promising and value-driven methodology incorporating security at the product lifecycle besides development and operations components. DevSecOps has already been known to reduce security vulnerabilities while reaping the same advantages of integrating development and operations just as in DevOps.
DevSecOps: Integrating Security with DevOps
When it comes to the integration of security with the DevOps, it boasts of a different approach corresponding to both processes and tools. In the already agile development methodology of DevOps, the collaborative inputs of security experts will only help to enhance the security safeguards for the project. This approach will make security as silent and effective as possible while keeping the seamless and agile nature of DevOps methodology intact.
As of now, the takers of the DevSecOps approach have been very few in numbers, while most development companies by embracing DevOps approach are ready to reap the agile development benefits from a collaborative environment comparison growth professionals from both app developers and operations team. The need of the hour is to make them understand about the significance of security in the product life cycle and the way security experts can enhance the security safeguards from the very early stage of the product development.
What are the Best Practices for DevSecOps?
The approach of DevSecOps is quite simple. The development companies need to integrate security experts besides the regular operations and development team members working in DevOps projects. The real objective of the approach is to make security a core element in the workflow. To realize this objective to the fullest extent, DevSecOps must follow the following time tested and tried practices.
Embracing Automation as the Key Element
Just as we know, the DevOps approach requires full process automation; DevSecOps cannot undermine the importance of automating the security as well. There should be a whole host of security automation tools for DevSecOps methodology. Only these security automation tools can reap the benefits of the approach to the ultimate extent.
Ensuring Container Security
Since containers are known to carry open-source software applications full of security vulnerabilities and risk factors, the DevSecOps must have robust container security solution as a safeguard against them.
Figure out Effective Security for APIs and Microservices
The security solutions within the DevSecOps methodology should work consistently. This requires addressing the security risks and vulnerabilities involved in APIs, microservices, and serverless solutions. These areas require the most consistent and solid security focus.
Evaluating your code dependencies
Since code with various security vulnerabilities belonging to open source software solutions often prove to be risky enough, you need automated security checks for code in all third-party components. This is one effective way to have safeguard against vulnerabilities from code dependencies.
Ensuring secure coding practices
A great number of security risks simply emerge from under-optimized coding practices. This is one area that you need to address by training the developers about secure coding practices. Secure coding practices should be given priority to ensure optimum output from the DevSecOps approach of development.
Make A Wise Selection of Security Tools
In a DevSecOps project, you also need to choose the most effective and efficient security tools that are equally feature-rich and efficient. Apart from allowing easy integration into the development pipeline, the tools must allow easy collaboration and cooperation among the team members.
The Key Benefits of DevSecOps Approach for Any App
DevSecOps allows integration of the security automation within the DevOps development process. There are several advantages of integrating such security checks with the DevOps development process.
Let us evaluate some of the key benefits of DevSecOps methodology for any app development project.
It Offers A More Holistic and Consistent Approach to Security
Just as in DevOps approach the operations have been integrated for ensuring more productivity and output while maintaining optimum agility, the integration of security automation in the development process ensures more consistency and holistic approach to security. The security automation with DevOps makes everyone more proactive and responsive in respect of addressing security flaws.
Better Industry Regulatory Compliance
Since for data storage or data access, there are already several industry regulations and constraints, and companies often have the chance of taking wrong steps regarding data usage. This becomes particularly hurting and contentious when dealing with customer data. This is where DevSecOps, by incorporating security automation versed in the latest regulations can play a positive role.
Active Threat Detection
DevSecOps, thanks to its robust security automation tools and practices, helps the team and the entire process to stay on their toes for dealing with security threats and vulnerabilities. Naturally, with DevSecOps, active threat detection gets a solid boost. With active and always aware, threat detection mechanisms are always at work, on-the-go and active threat detection never face any hurdle.
Enhanced Encryption and Authorization Control
One of the crucial security features that most apps are benefited from is encryption. Authorization is another way to safeguard application data and prevent unsolicited access to data and features. These features are better controlled and managed by the security automation tools in the DevSecOps environment. From ruling how the encryption needs to be handled to evaluating the authorization process, the security automation tools can handle them in a pretty agile and proactive manner.
Scaling up with the user growth
Instead of coming with frequent security upgrades and updates to scale up the security and management capacity when the number of users grows, the security automation tools in the DevSecOps environment take care if scaling up the security and app capacity automatically.
Conclusion
DevSecOps has emerged as the most proactive, robust, scalable, and rich methodology to take care of the entire development life cycle of software application products. In the time to come, we can expect more DevOps projects to embrace DevSecOps methodology.
About the Author:
Nathan McKinley is a Business Development Manager at Cerdonis Technologies LLC – mobile app development company in Chicago, USA providing secured app usability because the future is much more about the safety of the app users what DevOps Approach can do flawlessly. 4+ Years as a Business Developer and along with this he loves to write on technology vulnerabilities to provide real value of insights on tech updates and how we can utilize.