Organizations are reducing development challenges caused by the shortage in specialized cybersecurity personnel by implementing the collaborative development framework, DevSecOps (development, security, and operations).
DevSecOps prioritizes the developer over tools and integrates security as a part of the DevOps foundation. Security is directly incorporated into every stage of the development cycle, eliminating the security bottleneck that often slows the efficiency of the DevOps approach.
How DevSecOps Responds to the Cybersecurity Talent Shortage?
DevSecOps encourages developers to contribute to security. Security teams share their knowledge, build tools, and show developers security behaviors, helping them adapt and think like security specialists.
Two of the main security behaviors developers learn are threat modeling and code review. There are tools to support these behaviors but the primary responsibility falls on developers.
● Threat modeling centers on security and making design decisions that will protect customers’ data. Developers must think like an attacker and consider the security implications of every decision. For this security behavior, security specialists show developers how to create a threat model and demonstrate threat modeling on an active design.
● Security Code Review is a revision of another developer’s code that focuses on searching for faults to improve upon. DevSecOps professional detects security weaknesses that could be exploited upon reaching production and repair them before code changes a build.
The Role of Leadership
Leadership is essential to integrating cybersecurity efforts into an already functioning DevOps team. Organizations must override the ‘security vs development’ mindset and make cybersecurity an everyone effort:
● Focus on team interaction and transparency. Frequent engagement and collaboration will create routine touchpoints in which the teams can better understand each other’s perspectives, goals, and challenges
● Start small. Start by including obligatory security checks into code reviews, then go bigger, like building a unified workflow for processes
● Create shared goals and metrics. Have the teams work on common objectives like improving time to market and discovering a greater quantity of vulnerabilities and inefficiencies in pre-production
DevSecOps Processes
DevSecOps teams must create a system that works well with the technologies appropriate to their team and the size and complexity of the project. Although roadmaps may vary, the process generally follows the following steps:
● Planning and development: Teams assess risk tolerance and carry out a risk/benefit analysis. DevSecOps professionals must also focus on security and performance with acceptance test criteria, threat-defense models, user designs, and application interface and functionality.
● Building, testing, and security scanning: Automated build tools encourage test-driven development while an automated testing framework promotes strong testing practices in the pipeline, including passive security testing.
● Deploying, operating, and monitoring: The DevSecOps team is responsible for continuous monitoring, maintenance, and upgrades to secure the organization’s infrastructure and safeguard against human error, a breach, and zero-day vulnerabilities. Continuous monitoring tools ensure that security systems are performing as intended.
● Scaling and adapting: Thanks to virtualization solutions and cloud solutions, organizations can scale their IT infrastructure or even replace it in the event of a threat. To grow, organizations must evolve with emerging continuous improvement trends in DevSecOps practices in security, functionality, and performance.
DevSecOps and Scalability
Companies that successfully adopt DevSecOps, are able to deliver code and features faster, making scalability a foundational priority for any DevSecOps model. Setting up automation practices, defined workflows, and the appropriate tools, helps DevSecOps meet future needs as they develop.
The advantages offered by DevSecOps that support scalability include greater regulatory compliance, more thorough documentation, and the ability to take advantage of cloud-native infrastructures and technologies that offer an edge in today’s market.
Our full article about cybersecurity and closing the gap on cybersecurity talent can be downloaded for free. Read the eBook and integrate security benefits into your development processes.
Encora and DevSecOps
Encora’s experience in DevSecOps allows our teams to improve agility and respond in real-time to shifting market demands and evolving security threats. By considering security at every stage of development, we shorten development cycles, increase deployment frequencies, and deliver robust, dependable releases to improve your application’s time to market.
