Integrate security into your DevOps environment to enable the development of secure software. In the simplest terms, DevSecOps means automated security. Often mistaken as the coalescence of DevOps and Security, DevSecOps refers to just the security piece of DevOps. As a practice within DevOps, DevSecOps allows organizations to inject security into products as they are built and deployed, typically as part of a CI/CD pipeline.
DevSecOps includes security in every phase of the software development lifecycle, enabling secure software development at the speed of DevOps.
Reducing Attack Surface
While DevOps has transformed the way software is deployed, Cybersecurity risks are on the rise, including data privacy concerns, with over 36 billion records being exposed in the first three quarters of 2020 alone. Obviously, developing software with poor security practices or little integration with the security team can be disadvantageous to any organization.
DevSecOps is a natural extension of DevOps, as its goal is to increase the security posture of the system while being baked into the development and deployment process. By combining the right mix of vulnerability scanning, static code analysis, Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for Supply Chain Security, chaos engineering, and other security tools into the release cycle, the teams’ ability to identify and remediate vulnerabilities and security risk is enhanced. This limits the window a threat has to take advantage of vulnerabilities in your code or production systems, especially if restrictions are placed on a teams’ ability to push new versions of the code between environments before moving to the next stage (e.g. promotion from dev to staging and on to production).
Benefits of DevSecOps
The primary benefit of DevSecOps is catching vulnerabilities in your software before they ever make it to production, but DevSecOps also enables:
Efficiency : Having automated workflows for security helps the security team more quickly and clearly identify areas of concern to remediate.
Cost-Effectiveness : A pipeline that automatically scans and reports to the security team can multiply what one team member can do exponentially.
Compliance :If your product or company is required to comply with strict security controls or data privacy laws, DevSecOps could help you more quickly attain certification or approval
Observability and Traceability : Logging and monitoring are key components of a strong DevSecOps playbook, and can help trace route cause analysis for production issues and concerns
Reliability : Understanding what could go wrong through insight provided by DevSecOps tooling can provide insight into how to improve automated failover and recovery from potential worst case scenarios.
The Why of DevSecOps
Organizations that build DevSecOps tooling into their deployment pipeline catch security vulnerabilities before they ever make it into production deployments, reducing the overall attack surface of their product and greatly reducing the risk of reputation-ruining events or worse, ransom.
Organizations that embrace DevSecOps tools and practices end up building more secure, reliable, and trustworthy systems for end-users, often for less cost with more effectiveness than organizations that have a large security personnel footprint.
If you’re looking to jump into adopting DevSecOps for your own product or team but aren’t sure where to start, harpoon can help you deploy and configure tools for your own use without any need to write any of your own code or DevOps scripts. harpoon also increases your security posture by setting up your virtual infrastructure using industry best practices and a security first mindset, bullet proofing your cloud service provider account before ever deploying software workloads.
