Combining Security and DevOps – DevSecOps

Security by nature is a restrictive measure, generally it inhibits way of doing things. Which can be quite complicated combined with DevOps, a set of practices, workflows, and tools that combined improves the lifecycle of software. DevSecOps integrates security into these practices, making it easier and faster to develop and do operations work on the software.

Previously leaders of infrastructure and operations or software engineering leaders has had the freedom to work independent of security work. However, recent occurrences of security breaches, increased risk of cyber-attacks, compliance and regulations has imposed a higher degree of need to integrate security into the DevOps workflow for many software vendors.

As the IT department or developers must continue to deliver and develop code and innovation to improve products and services, the traditional approach to security being its own subunit, and doing testing outside of the development process is proving inefficient. Bottlenecks and friction are building up between the teams.

To combining the restrictive nature of security and the flexibility and efficiency of DevOps the leaders of these processes should work together to form DevSecOps.

A new way of working and thinking about DevOps and Cyber Security. Pushing security out of purely a centralized function, but rather as a spoke-hub distribution out in the organization. Making security champions inside the development and operations teams ensuring compliance to security standards. This way it will be integrated into the practice of running DevOps. Eliminating wasteful practices and combining collaboration of security early in development stages, implementing security-oriented tooling in the DevOps process, alongside security monitoring in the observability and monitoring stage.

Looking further into the business problem at hand, we see that security is a problem in hindsight of development and operations, and not a part of the greater overall issue. In normal DevOps practices security is not a concern in the CI/CD pipelines and is not factored into the backlogs of the product. This makes it hard for the operational part to stay compliant while maintaining up-time on the application. Doing all of this as a separate process post deployment creates huge challenges in maintaining compliance with security standards and regulations.

To achieve the goal of implementing security inside the DevOps process, moving to DevSecOps, product owners need to work with the people responsible for security inside the company to integrate it in a continuous process. Ensuring a cultural change to security mindset, tools, and automation tools to check for security so they can maintain the rapid speed and agility of DevOps.

As mentioned earlier the security process needs to be pushed out in the organization and needs to be a hub-spoke designed. So that all security standards and approaches come from the centralized entity for control, but enforcement comes from decentralized actors throughout the organization.

One way of implementing this is creating security champions in each team. Who sits with already established knowledge of working inside their respective team. Their understanding of how to apply security in a way that does not limit agility and speed will be of great benefit to all, and they already have established connections inside the team, making change easier. They will work closely with security teams, be trained, and rewarded accordingly to their efforts.

Security is a skill that can be learned or sometimes people understand it, make sure to recruit the right people or train people excited about it.

When you have your champions out in the organization working actively with security in their respective teams, you are ready to start rolling out the integration of security into the DevOps process. Starting to make tools and automation that considers security in the DevOps process transforming to DevSecOps. This process needs to be incremental and should be step-by-step. Generally, you can start backwards, first with customer facing applications that are already rapidly deployed. They will have less security risk in case of bugs, and due to already high volume of deployments stress tests the capacity of the automations and tools.

Here you can get tools such as In-App protection tools, application security, software analysis tools. What is important to consider is that you are supposed to prevent, monitor, and fix anomalies with these tools. However, do not get lost in the prevention zone, as many can overspend on hardening their security measures, but this can come at the expense of flexibility. Evenly spend resources on automating the monitoring and fixing of anomalies that come through the prevention layer.

Applying this to the steps in the DevOps process will reveal that along the way, you can implement standard security practices seamlessly into Devops. Making the shift to Devops.

In general, you could also outsource the process of DevOps, and training your product owners on Cyber Security. Enforcing the process of DevSecOps on your managed services, so you can fully focus on monitoring, observability, and hardening or prevention. Making so that the managed services partner takes care of that process. Here in Konfitech many of our partners already have established DevSecOps practices and can handle that part of the process with you as you ensure compliance and development speed is not compromised. Ensuring the agility, speed, security, and less technical overhead that will allow you to execute to your rate. Konfitech is your trusted IT Sourcing partner and cloud strategist when it comes to anything, especially DevOps or DevSecOps.

If you are looking for managed partners to take control of your DevOps practice, you can learn more about it here: https://www.konfitech.com/managed-services

For security: https://www.konfitech.com/cyber-security

For how to get DevSecOps, Managed Services, or Security partners to integrate with your business reach out for a conversation here: https://www.konfitech.com/contact-us

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Want to learn more about common use cases of Konfitech? Check out our case studies: https://www.konfitech.com/case-studies-and-tech-stack