DEVOPSdigest

DevSecOps, a combination of "DevOps" and "Security," is an approach to software development that builds on the practices of DevOps and integrates a focus on security practices. This helps ensure that your products are secure and that vulnerabilities are tackled early in your software development process.

The goal is to create a secure pipeline that reflects actual business requirements while increasing speed and agility. Organizations can move faster and still be safe by taking an agile approach to DevOps and adding security controls.

In this blog, you'll learn more about DevSecOps, including why making your entire organization more secure is essential. You'll also learn about tools you can use for each step in a sample DevSecOps toolchain.

Why is DevSecOps Critical?

DevSecOps helps shift security left, ensuring that it's baked into the development process from the beginning, not viewed as something that slows development or left as a last-minute afterthought. By breaking down the traditional silos of development and security, DevSecOps allows developers and security professionals to work together towards a common goal, accelerating the development timeline while maintaining robust security practices.

Done well, DevSecOps reduces friction between developers and security professionals. By building automated security checks into your development pipeline, your team can find potential vulnerabilities earlier in the build process, when they're still relatively isolated and easy to debug. This results in more secure software and a faster development cycle.

The Difference Between DevOps and DevSecOps

While DevOps and DevSecOps may appear similar in that they both aim to improve the efficiency of the software development process, there are also some significant differences.

DevOps is a software development technique and an organizational culture shift that automates and integrates the efforts of development and IT operations teams — two organizations that have traditionally worked separately or in silos — to create higher-quality software faster.

DevSecOps emphasizes security through the entire development cycle, rather than focusing on application security only after deployment has occurred. It automates security integration at every stage of the software development lifecycle, from initial design to integration, testing, deployment, and software delivery.

Security Tools Needed to Implement DevSecOps

DevSecOps tools have taken over the world of secure software development, with developers and security operations teams adopting them to help prevent errors in their application code. The following list presents the top categories of these DevSecOps tools.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) Tools

Software composition analysis tools examine programs for faults in open source code. These faults might include security vulnerabilities, open source software licenses, and quality issues. SCA solutions have reporting capabilities and the ability to create a software bill of materials (SBOM).

Static Application Security Testing (SAST) Tools

SAST tools examine source code to find vulnerabilities and security defects before they're deployed into production, enabling organizations to accelerate their release cycles while maintaining security standards and reducing risk.

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST) Tools

DAST is a black-box testing approach for detecting application vulnerabilities from an attacker's perspective without access to the source code. They replicate typical attack paths and simulate how attackers could see and exploit problems. Because it's automated and easy to combine with other DevOps technologies, DAST is a fantastic technique to check application security in testing or staging environments.

Dynamic application security testing solutions can automatically perform security testing on running applications, testing for some real threats. These tools test a web application's HTTP and HTML interfaces.

Container Scanners

Container scanning tools are software that scans containers for vulnerabilities to keep track of risks in an organization's environment. These tools ensure that containerized applications are secure before deployment and offer capabilities such as firewalling and recognizing anomalies based on behavioral analytics.

Container scanners may also be used to identify whether the software has been modified in a way that makes it dangerous or unusable.

Vaults

Vault is used to store secrets, allowing you to safeguard sensitive data such as API keys, passwords, certificates, and more. Vaults offer firm access control, thorough audit logs, and a single interface for all secrets throughout your infrastructure.

Conclusion

The rise of modern applications means regulators will scrutinize software development more closely. DevSecOps tools could make all the difference in developing a dependable, secure, and compliant software solution for clients or stakeholders.

However, managing a DevSecOps toolchain can be challenging. Integrating these tools into your workflow takes work, connecting them to other parts of your software development process, and, even more, working on using those integrations.

Some common challenges include:

■ Finding ways to provide security at all points in the software lifecycle, from design through deployment. Friction between security and development needs can result in both teams feeling that their work is being deprioritized.

■ Not having the time or resources to implement a fully-fledged DevSecOps toolchain. This can lead to developers spending too much time writing glue code or performing manual testing instead of automating testing and deployment.

■ Keeping up with the rapidly changing landscape of DevSecOps tools. Integrating new tools into your existing toolchain can be challenging, and developers struggle when toolsets differ among teams due to a lack of standards and training.

Opsera integrates with all of the DevSecOps tools you already use, letting you monitor the status of your security operations program through a single interface. It helps you automate your DevSecOps pipeline and manage all the tools and processes required to run it smoothly.