Insights

DevSecOps: The unification of development and security

Saikant Gade, UST PACE Practice Director, Cloud Transformation & DevOps

Today’s development lifecycles and environments are faster and more sophisticated than they've ever been. While DevOps culture has existed for some time, the more mature frameworks being established today will require additional security.

Increased worldwide digital connectivity and digitization have increased the incidence of cyber threats, making security business-critical and placing it higher on priority lists. It has heightened due to every business needing to accommodate more remote workers during the pandemic.

Research shows that in 2020, data breaches increased by 273%. In response, 74% of IT leaders have confirmed an acceleration of security initiatives.

These statistics create higher demand for DevSecOps—the definitive integration of development, security and operations.

Let's take a closer look to see what it means to truly adopt a DevSecOps approach and how it benefits enterprises that do it successfully.

Quick takeaways

As software development cycles become shorter and more sophisticated, it becomes increasingly important to fully integrate security testing into the development process.

Companies dedicated to DevSecOps embrace security as an asset and house their security testing and troubleshooting with their development teams.

DevSecOps creates many benefits for organizations that do it well, including increased speed of software delivery, reduced costs, better security and more collaboration.

DevSecOps best practices balance prioritization of people, processes and systems to create a culture and environment that drives success.

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps is an approach to platform design integrating development, security, and operations across the entire IT lifecycle. It evolved from DevOps once organizations realized that the model wasn't enough to address the rapidly changing security concerns. It helps automate software development and information technology operations to build, test and release software faster and more efficiently.

DevSecOps: Why security entered the scene

Historically, development cycles lasted several months or even years, which allowed for plenty of time for quality assurance and security testing at the final stages of the development process.

DevOps, which predated DevSecOps, created a culture that emerged alongside modern application development and deployment processes. It aims to shorten the development lifecycle, deliver applications at a higher velocity than traditional methods, and adopt more agile approaches.

DevOps has fostered new levels of innovation and transformed the software development industry. It has also been the impetus for the shift-left mentality behind security's true integration with development, also known as DevSecOps.

The emergence of public clouds, containers, CI/CD pipelines, microservices (and the like) all require security to be baked into the development process from the start. Traditional approaches to security testing simply can't keep pace.

Attributes of a true DevSecOps environment

• Security is handled by the development team: Security testing and troubleshooting occur as a back and forth between developers and IT security teams. Security testing is automated and baked into the development lifecycle.
• Security-as-code mindset: Security is valued and embraced as an important component of the development process. Developers take security into account when they're writing code. Security is systematically integrated into testing and deployment procedures.
• Security is a collaborative effort: Addressing security issues removes blame from the equation. Teams identify and measure security KPIs are identified and share responsibility for security outcomes and performance across teams.

Creating a DevSecOps operation and culture within an organization requires excellent leadership and the ability to guide developers and teams through a mindset shift. Security, once viewed as the “department of no,” must now be embraced as a real contributor to DevOps performance.

When done successfully, organizations reap many benefits from their DevSecOps adoption, including:

• Increased software delivery speed
• Proactive security measures that avoid larger vulnerabilities and threats
• Security teams with more time to spend on strategic work
• Reduced costs
• Better cross-team collaboration

DevSecOps best practices

Implementing a new DevSecOps approach within an organization requires a high level of commitment from leadership. Even companies with established DevOps strategies encounter periodic obstacles that must be handled.

There are some specific practices you can put in place to create resilient teams and strategies that can withstand the inevitable challenges that arise in a complex DevSecOps environment.

• Prioritize culture: Security has traditionally been perceived as a roadblock that slows down development and causes unwanted extra steps for developers. Reversing this myopic view requires a culture shift that embraces security as a value-add to the development process and a shared responsibility across teams.
• Training and education: Developers and teams may want to embrace DevSecOps but don't feel equipped to do it. They require the right knowledge and resources to do it successfully.
• Establish strong reporting processes: Security issues should have specific, clearly outlined procedures for reporting that clarify the next steps for a developer that flags an issue. One way to encourage this is by centralizing security and quality issues to run through the same review process and system to operationalize their equal importance.
• Keep shifting left: Strong DevSecOps strategies aim to continually shift left to integrate security testing and measures earlier and earlier in the development lifecycle. Doing so creates additional benefits like cost savings, higher efficiency and competitive advantages.
• Encourage secure coding practices: Teach your developers the principles of secure coding to make sure it's truly embedded in your processes from the very first step.
• Automate early and often: Automation is necessary to maintain speed and scalability in your DevSecOps strategy. Automate security testing and procedures as early and as often as possible to create consistent and repeatable processes.

Start your DevSecOps journey

UST has experts and solutions that can help you navigate the important shift from traditional DevOps to a truly DevSecOps environment.

Contact us today to build your successful DevSecOps strategy.