DevSecOps

DevSecOps is an approach that relies heavily on automation and platform design that integrates security as a shared responsibility. It is a culture-driven development style that normalises security as a day-to-day operation.

What is the value?

DevSecOps helps bring down vulnerabilities, maximises test coverage, and intensifies the automation of security frameworks. This reduces risk massively, assisting organisations in preventing brand reputation damage, and economic losses due to security flaws incidents, making life easier for auditing and monitoring.

How to implement this efficiently?

Culture is key. It does not work without open communication and trust. It only works with collective effort. DevSecOps should aim to bridge the security knowledge gaps between teams; for everyone to think and be accountable for security, they first need the tools and knowledge to drive this autonomy efficiently and confidently.

DevSecOps Challenges

Security silos

It is common for many security teams to be left out of DevOps processes and portray security as a separate entity, where specialised people can only maintain and lead security practices. This situation creates a silo around security and prevents engineers from understanding the necessity of security or applying security measures from the beginning.

This is not scalable or flexible. Security should be a supportive function to help other teams scale and build security, without security teams being a blocker, but rather a ramp to promote secure solutions and decisions. The best practice is to share these responsibilities across all team members instead of having a specialised security engineer.

Lack of visibility & prioritisation

Aim to create a culture where security and other essential application components treat security as a regular aspect of the application. Developers can then focus on development with confidence about security instead of security departments playing police and the blame game. Trust should be built between teams, and security should promote the autonomy of teams by establishing processes that instil security.

Stringent processes

Every new experiment or piece of software must not go through a complicated process and verification against security compliances before being used by developers. Procedures should be flexible to account for these scenarios, where lower-level tasks should be treated differently, and higher-risk tasks and changes are targeted for these more stringent processes.

Developers need environments to test new software without common security limitations. These environments are known as “SandBox,” which are temporarily isolated environments. These environments have no connection to any internal network and have no customer data.