Why DevSecOps is Necessary

Before the integration of development, operations, and security, teams were kept functionally separate and focused on their area of specialism. This might have been appropriate or even advantageous with self-managed data centers. But cloud computing has driven an understanding of how the bridging of those functions could bring together their respective strengths, whilst addressing their weaknesses and reducing costs.

The cloud model promotes public connectivity, performance, resilience, and collaboration. Data proliferation is at an all-time high at the same time as connectivity and collaboration encourage accessibility and sharing. Combine that with an increased application update velocity and your data has never been more at risk, and the consequences of data breaches, both financially and reputationally, could be catastrophic. This realization has led organizations to understand that by prioritizing speed of deployment and flexibility, security may have become an afterthought.

Without DevSecOps, organizations are increasingly encountering the following:

• Vulnerabilities in Production: Without appropriate tools and processes throughout the lifecycle, opportunities to discover security vulnerabilities are reduced. Vulnerabilities present early in the lifecycle are promoted through environments, and may not be discovered until after an application is released to customers.

• Data Breach: Exposed secrets and misconfiguration are all too easily introduced as code becomes more complex, and containerization introduces layers that may be infrequently updated. All it takes to let a malicious actor in is one small error.

• Developers Prioritize Velocity: Developers are often incentivized to produce code quickly, which can encourage less rigorous working practices.

• Expensive Remediation Activities: We’ve all heard prevention is better than cure, and vulnerability management versus remediation is the definition of that. Having to stop development effort and redirect valuable resources to reactively address an issue post-launch is a great deal more painful and expensive than addressing it when it is introduced.

• Security as an afterthought: Traditional security as a self-contained discipline is often seen as a gatekeeper at the conclusion of the lifecycle rather than integral to successful product development. This creates the impression of a group creating delay, who may be circumvented to save time.

Integrating Security into the SDLC

For DevSecOps to be successful, security should be included in every stage of the software development lifecycle. Security shifting left in DevSecOps means vulnerabilities are detected earlier and can be addressed before they become incidents:

• Planning needs to go beyond application features and user journey, with DevSecOps requiring equal attention to security considerations, threat analysis, and security benchmarks.

• Requirements gathering also needs to include security amongst the traditional functional and non-functional requirements. Encryption standards, storage and access, authentication, logging and monitoring, SIEM integration, and many more, should be clearly defined.

• Development best practices extend to security, with emphasis on applications that are secure by design. Security tools and processes are made available to developers to enable them to identify and address vulnerabilities as they work, minimizing rework. The goal here is reliable development processes that are consistent and reusable.

• Build processes include vulnerability scanning of static code, as well as scanning within the CI/CD pipeline to ensure code is vulnerability free as it is promoted through environments. Scanning ensures the code developed and the initial design are aligned, and exposed secrets or misconfiguration are identified.

• Test automation is vital to the dynamic nature of DevSecOps, ensuring the security of all components at every stage of the lifecycle.

• Deployment in DevSecOps is automated, providing consistency as well as efficiency. Scanning within the deployment process ensures code is vulnerability free before production release.

• Maintenance task automation improves performance as well as reliability and availability while minimizing human-error. This means Ops staff have more capacity to respond to zero-day threats.

Streamlining the DevSecOps Process

As you’ll have noticed in the previous section, automation is key to the successful adoption of DevSecOps. Continuous scanning and monitoring enable security vulnerabilities to be identified at the first opportunity, with continuous development and improvement following as a result. With DevSecOps keeping security at the forefront of application development and operations, your organization can be sure of delivering secure applications of high quality to your customers.

Wiz provides ongoing and automated vulnerability scanning from source code development to deployment. Every layer of your multi-cloud environment can be assessed whether you’re running virtual machines, containers, serverless, or anything else! Get a single view of your security posture whether you’re just starting out on your cloud journey or a well-established enterprise.

Wiz continuously monitors, evaluates, and prioritizes risks from misconfiguration across clouds, including automatic posture management and remediation. IaC scanning, CIS benchmarking and compliance reporting are also built in. Automatically identify and remediate security threats from exposed secrets and malware to vulnerabilities, identity weaknesses, and network exposure. Get contextual insights that empower you to make risk-based decisions and reduce your attack surface, enabling security integration throughout the software development lifecycle.