What is DevSecOps and Why it is important?

As cyber threats continue to increase, it becomes challenging for a business to keep up. Securing resources and data is a continuous journey, not a destination. A ham-handed approach to security sounds inadequate to meet this requirement. Fortunately, a new approach to manage risk is evolving to meet the challenges and bring a revolutionary operational and technical innovation to cybersecurity.

DevSecOps –integrating security as code approach within DevOps.

Read on to learn What is DevSecOps and check out why it is important to your business.

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps is an extension of the DevOps culture and it embeds security processes and controls into the DevOps approach and automates the essential security tasks. Let’s check out the definition of DevOps first.

What is DevOps?

DevOps philosophy is understood as a speed – combines the tools and processes, which enables ongoing collaboration between the infrastructure and application engineering teams. It automates the consistent delivery of services and applications across enterprises. DevOps concentrates on areas like continuous integration, continuous monitoring, automated provisioning, and test-driven development.

DevSecOps is a cultural shift, which combines security, development, and operations. This discipline helps businesses deliver innovative applications quickly without compromising security. It creates efficient collaboration between teams, thereby identify the potential security issues during the development stage itself- not after the release in line with the continuous software development practices.

Watch this webinar to know how DevSecOps as a Service takes your AppSec to the Next Level!

DevSecOps vs DevOps: The success of DevSecOps over DevOps

Major Components

• Change Management – enables users to submit changes, which can amplify efficiency and speed and allows them to find whether the impact of the changes is positive or negative.
• Code Analysis – As it insists on security as code, it enables the quick detection of vulnerabilities by delivering the code in small portions.
• Compliance monitoring – it allows organizations to be compliant with regulations like PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Digital Security Standard) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and also be prepared for security audits at any time.
• Threat Investigation – Each code update includes the possibility of potential threats. It identifies those threats at the earliest and helps to respond immediately.
• Security-related training – enforce organizations to train their IT and software engineers in cyber-security concepts and equip them with the basic routine guidelines.

Why is DevSecOps important?

DevOps was once adequate for software companies, but it failed to account for compliance and security. Also, hackers, today employ advanced techniques to launch attacks, which can put organizations in danger. If application developers can’t detect exploits, they risk delivering applications, which contain viruses, malware, and other security issues.

With the DevSecOps approach, the development team works with the security team and quickly identifies vulnerabilities and resolve them before they get exploited. This supports enterprises consistently deliver agile, fast, and secure application iterations. Adopting DevSecOps as a service enables businesses better serve customers by rolling out new capabilities and features at a fast pace. It secures critical applications, data, and companies’ reputations.

Benefits of DevSecOps as a Service

Adopting security as code practice allows you to develop secure code from the beginning instead of adding the security at the final stage. With the DevSecOps approach, companies can attain the following benefits:

• Cost-saving – As developers can quickly detect and fix security vulnerabilities throughout the SDLC, they can limit costly risks associated with time-intensive security vulnerabilities. By only looking for approaches and tools, which will help you to design secure applications, you can save resource management costs as well.
• Heightened Threat Hunting – equip the developers to detect security threats before they cause damage to brand reputation.
• Fast Recovery – You can create templates to speed up recovery from vulnerabilities and thereby limit outages, downtime, and other unwanted incidents.
• Transparent Culture – DevSecOps approach encourages the teams to work together, resulting in a transparent culture and openness, which leads to enhanced efficiency and productivity.
• Enhanced Overall Security – While reducing the security vulnerabilities, it also helps you to bolster your security monitoring, auditing, and notification efforts.
• Consistent Improvement – By continuously monitoring application success and failures, you can determine which steps to avoid during the development cycle. You can also use these metrics to detect the ways to speed up as well as enhance your delivery efforts, which differentiate you from the competitors.
• Leveraging Security Resources – DevSecOps automates most of the core security processes, which require lesser logical thinking such as account management, code security, event monitoring, and vulnerability assessments. As a result, security professionals can focus on threat remediation and strategic risk elimination.
• Automatic Securing of Code – As it automates tests with more coverage and enables excellent consistency & predictable process, reduces the risk of human errors which leads to security flaws.

How Indusface Helps Your DevSecOps Team

Indusface provides an extensive portfolio of application security tools and capabilities, most of which are of significance to the DevSecOps team. Especially AppTrana, a fully managed web application firewall can increase application security and reduce risks without disturbing your productivity.

This means we can help your developers with the right toolset, recommendations, and best practices, which provide helpful input without false positives and create a culture of security by default across your enterprise.

You may also want to read, How WAF and Application Security Scan fits in

The Closure

To ensure the application development runs smoothly, you should realize that there is nothing wrong with running security automation as a part of the software development cycle.

Leverage the DevSecOps approach with the right security service provider to accelerate development, achieve security, ramp up security testing cycles and deliver quality builds.