What are the Benefits of Adopting DevSecOps in your Digital Transformation projects?

DevSecOps is a set of practices that revolves around the development, operations, and security of organizations. The main objective of DevSecOps is to involve everyone in an enterprise to take responsibility for security. This approach aims to bring security decisions on the same scale as that of development and operations actions.

Enterprises looking to transform digitally must bring about cultural change first and embrace the DevSecOps mindset. This culture will influence employees across all disciplines and of all abilities to get to a whole new level of efficiency in security measures. 

DevSecOps framework features DevSecOps tools with which businesses can build security into applications right in its early stages of development, instead of later. From developing business-critical security services to detecting potential security attacks, DevSecOps will ensure security is integrated at all phases of your software delivery lifecycle. Such an approach allows you to employ continuous integration to reduce compliance costs and release software faster.

How Does DevSecOps work?

DevSecOps will integrate automation across your software release pipeline to reduce downtime, security attacks, and fix code issues faster.

Businesses who want to employ security into their DevOps framework need to utilize optimal DevSecOps processes and tools. 

Here’s how your DevOps and DevSecOps framework will look like:

• A developer writes code in a version control management system.
• Any changes made are applied throughout the version control management system.
• Other developer retrieves this code from the version control system to analyze the static code quality and look for any potential security bugs. 
• Utilizing infrastructure-as-code DevSecOps tools, developers create an environment such as Chef. In this infrastructure, you can easily deploy applications and perform environment-specific configurations.
• Perform test automation suite on the newly deployed application consisting of security tests, API, UI, integrations, and back-end.
• If the application runs seamlessly in testing, it is sent forward to the production environment.
• The production environment is kept under continuous monitoring to detect any active security risks, bugs, or attacks.

DevSecOps creates a test-driven development infrastructure that executes continuous integration and automated testing to create quality code, enhanced security, and compliance.

Benefits of DevSecOps to enhance your Digital Transformation Projects:

Over the past decade, enterprises have witnessed humongous change in their IT integrity with newer technologies such as agile cloud computing, dynamic applications, containerization, shared storage, and data. 

These new tools and methodologies have tremendously helped businesses to offer advanced applications and services to the customers. DevOps is one such software development culture that is highly trending across this industry. 

DevOps applications take your business-critical application to a whole new level regarding performance, speed, functionality, and scale. But, these applications often lag due to a lack of compliance and solid security. That’s when DevSecOps comes in!

DevSecOps integrated into your software development lifecycle will bring development, security, and operations under a single canopy.

Attackers are often looking for loopholes to exploit applications or deploy malware into them. If your security practices aren't in place, this malware inserted into an application during the initial stage might be deployed as it is to thousands of customers. This will not only damage brand reputation but also result in a loss of customer loyalty.

That’s why organizations must employ security in their development and operations pipeline. With DevSecOps, every developer and operational admin will prioritize security at every stage of developing and deploying business-critical applications.

Some of the main benefits of employing DevSecOps in your digital transformation projects are:

• Reduction in compliance costs
• Faster deployment of applications
• Increased software delivery rate
• Security checks, continuous monitoring, and automated deployment checks right from the beginning 
• Enhanced transparency right from the early stage of application development
• Faster speed of recovery in case of security attacks
• Secure by Design
• Ability to measure
• Enhanced and automated security throughout

Need for DevSecOps:

Developers need to be involved in the security pipeline to detect code flaws earlier and strategize behavioral baselines to secure modern DevOps applications. 

The digital transformation journey of enterprises across the globe continues to evolve rapidly. Today, every organization, be it large-scale or SMEs, are looking to employ the latest technology infrastructure. 

We know that organizations have software developers and DevOps (developer operations) teams with expertise who build and enhance different digital assets- such as websites, business applications, cloud servers, databases, and so on. 

DevOps solidifies the IT integrity of companies and helps developers in managing infrastructure as a software code. Meaning, it allows developers to deploy and configure applications with the same set of modern DevOps tools. This eliminates the need to wait for several weeks to get a newly provisioned server for their application. 

Today, developers can change or update new code in large applications several times per day, thanks to the CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Development) and DevOps tools. But in this process, you might also face undesirable security risks.

That’s where DevSecOps comes into the picture.

• For a DevOps framework to be successful, you need robust security integration. To keep the application code safe, businesses need to empower their developers with robust security tools.

• Enterprises must not wait for the security team to analyze and detect security vulnerabilities at a later stage. Instead, developers must utilize DevSecOps tools earlier to identify code problems right in the CI/CD pipeline.

• This approach will help developers fill up security gaps and mitigate security risks before reaching production infrastructure. 

• DevSecOps processes and tools are deployed wherever your new applications or code are, thereby securing your CI/CD pipeline. It is constantly being monitored and analyzed on run-time to identity risks, allowing developers to move the code faster to production.

Right DevSecOps Practices:

Enterprises looking to bring their IT operations, application developers, and security teams under one umbrella must consider DevSecOps tools and practices. The objective of DevSecOps is to prioritize security as a core element of your software development lifecycle, rather than considering it at later stages.

Here are a few best DevSecOps practices that will take your DevOps workflow to an enhanced level:

• Automation: DevOps revolve around software delivery speed, but this speed won’t be compromised due to the security measures you’ll be employing with DevSecOps. DevSecOps offers automated security checks and controls right at the beginning of the development cycle to ensure faster application delivery.

• Enhanced Efficiency: Adding security into your CI/CD pipeline will help to scan code simultaneously as you write it. This helps in identifying code bugs and flaws faster. 

• Threat modeling: Threat modeling practices are executed to help you identify the vulnerabilities in your security tests and controls. You will be able to detect risky events that might occur across your infrastructure and thereby take necessary precautions into your DevOps workflow.

Wrap Up:

DevSecOps will make every developer in the team an expert in deploying native and web application security. This approach is cost-effective, preventative, and proactive in the long run. 

Adopting DevSecOps will involve all developers in taking security measures and creating an environment where security starts right at the beginning of code. Inserting security in DevOps workflows will ensure your application code isn’t exposed to cyberattacks and is safe for users.

Enhanced automation and tooling are two of the main drivers of DevSecOps, which are able to boost the efficiency of your digital transformation projects to a great extent.