Organisations nowadays are aspiring to adopt DevOps to make and run their software in order to maintain their competitive edge. They are often burdened with legacy technologies, difficult processes and lack of skills internally to adapt to these methods. This might be challenging but when compounded with highly regulated operating conditions, the ability to adapt is made more challenging. In an environment in which change occurs at an increased speed and scale, innovative ways need to be thought of to manage security and compliance. Having to protect against potential security incidents that occur on a daily basis while maintaining compliance with strict regulations, leaves some security experts quaking in their boots.
By now, most enterprises have heard of DevSecOps, and most of them have begun to adopt or at least learn about DevSecOps practices. Keeping this in mind, a set of best practices have been developed to help you manage security at speed and scale.
DevSecOps Best Practices
The major goal of DevSecOps is to make sure security and DevOps engineers are engaged and collaborating with development from the start. The best practices for implementing DevSecOps include:
- People Management
Irrespective of how many advanced technologies you choose to implement, the fragile link of that chain will constantly be the human factor. This needs to be the initial point for any DevSecOps application. One of the challenges in DevSecOps implementation is the way old-fashioned teams assimilate with the broader business. Shifting the culture and raising awareness is not an easy task and it will need a top-down method if attitudes are to modify.
- Staff Training
For successful DevSecOps, you need to invest in staff training and professional development. Training and education on security best practices needs to be entrenched in the company’s aims, policies, and software security standards. For developing a worthy security staff, you should offer new employees with the proper training and tools they need to perform their job. Engage in expert security and DevOps training to increase staff skills and awareness. Also, empower DevOps engineers with security-specific coding training by sending them to industry conferences or engaging security consultants.
- Manage Processes
Development and delivery processes are implemented in any organisation irrespective of its size. Though these processes have been traditionally managed per team and often stay isolated from others, thus they are not productive. DevSecOps will allow you to implement a common development process across an enterprise and will facilitate cooperation to achieve safer outcomes collectively. For streamlining processes, it’s vital to create agreed methods of working that are well-documented and familiar to all. Consider engaging an external DevOps consultant to help identify how to improve and secure your development processes, as an un-biased third party may identify security gaps better than those who are part of the process already.
- Embrace Automation
Without automatic tools for compliance scanning, code analysis, configuration management, patching, and vulnerability management, organisations will fail to scale security of DevSecOps. Teams need to leverage automation and make use of orchestration, which is the key to DevSecOps success. Both automation and orchestration will make audits easier by using metadata, which makes decisions easier to accomplish as they are based on the data points and repeatable methods. Managing security using tools such as HashiCorp, AWS and tools like CodeClimate and XebiaLabs are essential elements of DevSecOps.
- Incident Management
With all the will and automation in the world, security incidents do still occur, and it is critical to be able to respond quickly and efficiently to security events. Incident management plans and workflows need to be created beforehand to ensure that the response to an incident is reliable, repeatable and quantifiable. In the complex world of DevSecOps, active and preventive threat hunting, as well as constant detection and response to threats, means that there are fewer incidents and more mitigations.
- Culture
The correct implementation of DevSecOps processes and technologies won’t be able to achieve anything if a company‘s culture does not allow the people to properly utilise it. When organisations implement DevSecOps, there is no longer just one security team, but a continually improved security mind-set across all business departments.
In the technology realm, the only constant is ‘change’. Obsolete security measures can deteriorate even the most active DevOps practices. This is the reason why security is at the heart of DevSecOps. For successful implementation, all sides need to work collectively so that applications and future updates are safe and released rapidly. While it does take time, effort and open mindsets to implement an effective DevSecOps culture, with the right people and attitude, it can be achieved.