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Despite a large amount of industry discussion and development around DevSecOps, it has been difficult to assess how much traction the movement has gained.
In a 2020 poll of 1,500 IT professionals conducted by the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center, 63 percent said they were including some DevSecOps activities into their development processes. However, “some” indicates that there are still some adopters who haven’t fully embraced DevSecOps. And what about the remaining 37%?
To summarize, even though development and security teams are still only in their infancy, two indications suggest that DevSecOps is beginning to break through into widespread usage.
The enormous amount of cyber assaults that have been hitting firms and government agencies necessitate a more aggressive and proactive approach to security. DevSecOps is precisely what it sounds like: a method for combining development, security, and operations to address cybersecurity concerns.
The Coronavirus pandemic has been a strong booster for digital transformation. According to Gartner, worldwide investment in public cloud services is expected to rise by roughly 23% in 2021, reaching $332 billion from $270 billion in 2020. COVID-19 is forcing organizations to rely increasingly on technology to meet the increasing demand for cloud services. As a result of these trends, enterprises will need to consider security risks throughout the modern software development cycle.
The logic of DevSecOps is beyond dispute. Viewing security as a collaborative responsibility shared by all levels of development, operations, and security teams, from the start—the approach known as shifting left—rather than in silos allows for the rapid and immediate deployment of secure software.
Companies that have successfully integrated the three functions under the broader DevOps methodology enjoy greatly reduced friction in software development and production. With fewer design flaws, misconfigurations, and other mistakes that can lead to security risks, these businesses may deploy code faster and more safely.
Many companies are still working out the kinks in their DevSecOps processes, which is evident in the fact that many of them haven’t consistently adopted many of its concepts. Here and there, outdated, linear waterfall approaches persist. Vulnerability management continues to be a reactive box-checking operation at later stages of development, forcing developers to go back and fix things that could have been done right the first time.
To be clear, DevSecOps is not a silver bullet for all of an organization’s cybersecurity woes. But it does offer a better way of approaching software development with security in mind from the start. It also provides a path to speed up delivery times while reducing risks.
When done right, DevSecOps can provide these benefits:
– Reduced time to market
– Increased deployment frequency
– Improved mean time to recovery
– Lower risks of vulnerabilities
To achieve these outcomes, development, security, and operations teams need to work together more closely than ever before. They also need to adopt the right tools and processes. In this article, we’ll discuss three key ingredients to DevSecOps success.
1. Knowledge and Expertise. DevSecOps is a cultural shift as much as a technical one. It necessitates a new mentality that allows developers to assume responsibility for creating safe code from the outset of the software development lifecycle. As a result, IT executives can’t just snap their fingers and expect DevSecOps to take hold if they don’t educate team members about why it’s important and how it works.
Gartner, the technology research firm, has found that DevOps “benefits from organizational learning and change.” In other words, people-related difficulties tend to be the most significant challenges, not technological ones.”
The point is that before an organization can start utilizing DevSecOps, it must first understand what the effort means and how it will help the company offer more value to consumers.
2. Process. The difference between a fast software development machine and one that is still sluggish might be as simple as applying the appropriate DevSecOps rules and procedures. Let’s take a look at an example. Many corporations that rely heavily on scanning tools to identify flaws impose ludicrous rules on them. Assume that vulnerabilities of a particular severity or type must be addressed before code is deployed to production. But what if the flaw is in an unimportant part of the program and is therefore unexploitable?
The greatest DevSecOps efforts include rules and procedures that go beyond simply running all code through the same pipeline to truly understand the context of a project, from inception to production, and handle everything in such a manner that it reflects real risk to security and compliance standards.
3. Tooling. A DevSecOps initiative will fail without the appropriate automated tools that give deep insight into code.
To implement the ideals of DevSecOps, businesses should look for tools that give developers all of the information they need to make more informed judgments.
These solutions must really cut down on the amount of time it takes to incorporate security into DevOps procedures by automating time-consuming manual operations such as threat modeling, security and compliance checks, pen testing, and risk assessments. The solutions can’t just aggregate data from silos, which fails to give enough contextual information and creates too many false positives. They must provide holistic relief to overworked teams trying to secure apps at the feature request, commit, pull request, and CI/CD stages.
Keeping these three factors in mind, companies may use DevSecOps to its full potential as a game-changer. As DevSecOps makes the transition from niche practice to widespread usage, enterprises may look to early adopters for advice on how to execute it properly.
