How DevSecOps is critical to enable your Software Development Life Cycle?

DevSecOps is all about integrating security right at the beginning of SLDC (software development life cycle), to reduce the potential vulnerabilities and empower business’s IT integrity and objectives.

DevSecOps is employed throughout SLDC in various stages with the help of people and technologies. As enterprises employ DevSecOps into SLDC, they will witness reduced compliance costs as codes are analyzed, tested, and deployed with utmost efficiency.

Let’s see how exactly DevSecOps is important for your SLDC.

Before DevOps came into action, corporations used to run security checks at the end of their SDLC. Their main focus was on the application development process, and security was considered to be of lesser concern. Such an approach tends to delay the release, as the product already passes through several stages in the pipeline and any issue tracking causes repetition of many laborious tasks. In case of a security threat, products have to go through most development stages all over again. 

That’s where DevSecOps comes in!

What is DevSecOps?

Security integrated into every step of the DevOps process.

DevSecOps goes one step further and incorporates security into the DevOps approach. Building security at the initial stage of application development reduces remediation time, reduces costs, and makes the software more reliable. Security exercises at all the stages of the pipeline will allow the DevOps team and SSG (Software Security Group) to deploy better and faster code. 

DevSecOps creates the much needed “everyone must prioritize security” mindset into all teams- be it planning, design, development, or testing team. It will help inject security measures into corporations’ DevOps pipeline, instead of saving security for the last stage of SDLC. 

How DevSecOps is critical to enable SLDC?

Primarily, DevSecOps is about high-level communications and collaboration between development, operations, and security teams right at the initial stage of SDLC. This approach prevents potential vulnerabilities and also provides a bunch of advantages in the long run. 

Corporations will not only experience operational efficiency but also avail enhanced product reliability at the end.

Implementation of DevSecOps yields quicker response times from cross-teams, a thorough analysis of code, earlier detection of code vulnerabilities, and security measures to tackle the same. Customers will be able to get their hands on secure products much faster. 

Implementing late-stage security measures can cause various problems for development and operations engineers. But with DevSecOps, the cross-departmental teams will be able to focus on other stages of the SDLC.

Here are some of the effective methods to employ DevSecOps throughout SDLC:

• Use CI (Continuous Integration) solutions to implement and automate security testing at the initial stage, before the software moves forward to production.
• Employ application security solution that will send safety alerts to the DevOps teams whenever it tracks an issue.
• Leveraging automation technologies to streamline security testing

Benefits of DevSecOps:

Adopting faster and newer development life cycles takes your operational efficiency to a whole new level. It is because security plays a vital role in every corporation’s workflow. Enterprises that understand and are well aware of the security exercises are often able to control and mitigate upcoming threats in SDLC. This lowers the costs incurred to fix them in the future.

DevSecOps culture encourages developers and testing teams to consider security as their topmost priority. This allows them to write better, secure code, and utilize modern security tools to integrate security all across the SDLC.

Apart from this, here are some other main advantages of DevSecOps:

DevSecOps can remarkably boost your product sales. The main objective of DevSecOps is to strengthen your overall security. As it involves continuous monitoring, it tends to improve the issue-tracking capabilities of corporations as well. Enterprises will notice lesser security bottlenecks in their pipeline. Teams will no longer have to wait for the development cycle to end, to run security checks. This innovative approach results in rapid code delivery.

Another important thing about DevSecOps is compliance with industry-standard rules. GDPR and other such regulations prioritize data handling the most. DevSecOps helps engineers and managers to get better insights into these regulations, thereby providing a better framework to comply with them.

Why is DevSecOps important for Application Security?

Software applications often are the main target of malicious attackers, because of:

• Easy access: Enterprises tend to rely on network segmentation and firewalls to mitigate potential threats. Software applications are prone to internet attacks, as it is made easily accessible for customers to use. As compared to other infrastructure, applications are more exposed to attackers, especially those who disguise themselves as genuine traffic.
• Critical information: Web applications comprise critical data, file shares, personal information, social security numbers, and credit card data. If you compromise with the security, attackers might get easy access to this critical information. 
• Easy penetration: Often attackers make use of tools to keep track of web applications, so they can spot and pinpoint exploitable vulnerabilities.

Most application vulnerabilities are detected in the source code. This is the reason why it is extremely essential to employ security throughout the SDLC. With a true DevSecOps implementation, corporations will be able to run application scans earlier in the development cycle. This saves a lot of time for developers and testers.

We all know how late-stage security testing can lead to delay in timelines, increase compliance costs, and frustrate developers later on.

Use Case

Verizon is one of the largest communication technology companies in the world. They adopted DevSecOps to their internal development process.

Verizon IT's AppSec group required an approach to facilitate stable DevOps because it moved to the cloud. They additionally needed to drive a culture change inside the organization. "We required something that is more supportable that can assist us with building a bigger impact of our incorporated group, and simultaneously, not consume the IT application group by continuing unloading more work on their plan for the day," clarifies Manah Khalil, IT director of software security. 

To accomplish those goals, they adopted a DevSecOps approach to their internal development process. They launched the developer dashboard program to help drive DevSecOps adoption and nurture a security culture. It combines technical aspects of vulnerability management with individual accountability to help instill a security mindset among the company’s developers.

Wrap Up:

There are many benefits of employing DevSecOps at the early stage of SDLC. Treating security vulnerabilities like software defects will help corporations with early detection. Developers and testing teams can tackle the issues right when they are working on the release.

Know that DevSecOps processes become mature with time and yield more benefits in the long run. It is a modern approach which when employed in your SDLC will promote the notion of “rapid and secure code delivery”.