How to explain DevSecOps in plain English

Modern software development leverages an agile-based SDLC to accelerate the development and delivery of software releases, including updates and fixes. DevOps focuses on the speed of app delivery, whereas DevSecOps augments speed with security by delivering apps that are as secure as possible as quickly as possible. For example, working as a software developer can help you build experience with coding and developing applications.
Simply put, DevSecOps is an extension of DevOps, where your focus is explicitly on the security role. With this approach, security becomes a shared responsibility between all team members. Typically, vulnerability checks are executed towards the end of the development cycle.
How is DevSecOps different from DevOps ?
Security teams will also find it easier to assess and remedy any vulnerabilities in high-quality code. Companies should eliminate silos and bring development, operations, and security teams together. Unity across teams will enable the experts in these groups to work together from the beginning of the development process and foresee any challenges. The seamless integration of development, security, and operations has become critical. To achieve this harmonious balance, adopt these DevSecOps best practices to foster a culture of collaboration, continuous improvement, and heightened security awareness.
For example, AWS CodePipeline is a tool that you can use to deploy and manage applications. DevOps culture is a software development practice that brings development and operations teams together. It uses tools and automation to promote greater collaboration, communication, and transparency between the two teams.
Challenges of DevSecOps
For example, security teams set up firewalls, programmers design the code to prevent vulnerabilities, and testers test all changes to prevent unauthorized third-party access. Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) is a modern software development practice https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ that uses automated build-and-test steps to reliably and efficiently deliver small changes to the application. Developers use CI/CD tools to release new versions of an application and quickly respond to issues after the application is available to users.
So the DevSecOps goal is to begin the security team’s involvement as early as possible in the development lifecycle. Real-time monitoring helps identify and mitigate security threats in production, allowing for immediate response and mitigation. Teams should leverage SIEM systems and APM tools to gain holistic insights into application behavior. DevSecOps takes this further by integrating security into the DevOps process from the start. It ensures that security is not an afterthought but a top priority throughout the entire software development process.
Developers on AWS
It makes security a shared responsibility among all team members who are involved in building the software. The development team collaborates with the security team before they write any code. Likewise, operations teams continue to monitor the software for security issues after deploying it. As a result, companies deliver devsecops software development secure software faster while ensuring compliance. From here, you’ll be able to create common, sharable automated pipelines that include security checks into your application development processes. This approach will ensure that security and consistency are built into your applications from the very beginning.
DevSecOps is the method that integrates security practices within the DevOps process. It creates and promotes a collaborative relationship between security teams and release engineers based on a ‘Security as Code’ philosophy. DevSecOps has gained popularity and importance, given the ever-increasing security risks to software applications. Overall, DevSecOps encompasses the practices of DevOps and integrates security as a pillar to the entire app development pipeline.
Change management
Security doesn’t stop after deployment; continuous monitoring and alerting are required during the complete life cycle of an application. DevSecOps focuses on short, iterative application development pipelines embedded with automated security checks. It offers a more version-controlled CI pipeline so it’s easier and faster for development teams to track and manage their code.
DevSecOps is a trending practice in application security (AppSec) that involves introducing security earlier in the software development life cycle (SDLC). It also expands the collaboration between development and operations teams to integrate security teams in the software delivery cycle. DevSecOps requires a change in culture, process, and tools across these core functional teams and makes security a shared responsibility. Everyone involved in the SDLC has a role to play in building security into the DevOps continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) workflow. DevSecOps is all about automating and integrating security within all phases of the software development life cycle to produce more secure code more quickly and easily.
IDE Scanning
The philosophy “security is everyone’s responsibility” should be a part of your organization’s DevSecOps culture. In many cases, however, choosing a more automated version of the security tools you have been using for years is not the right answer. Because your development environment has likely changed drastically over the past few years. The typical modern software application is comprised of 70% open source software. Unfortunately, accurately detecting vulnerabilities in open source software is not something traditional security tools were designed to do.
- This more manual step will generally happen shortly before or after development – and is crucial for effective DevSecOps.
- This security testing method continuously scans your containers to ensure they are performing as expected.
- With this approach, DevSecOps engineers strive to ensure that apps are secure against bugs and vulnerabilities, uphold the security checks, and are ready to be delivered to users.
- DevSecOps enables businesses to proactively address security concerns, lessen vulnerabilities, and produce safe and reliable apps by integrating security practises throughout the whole software development lifecycle.
- By emphasizing DevOps practices throughout a development cycle, developers will be able to enjoy greater control over product infrastructure and prioritize software performance over other purposes.
DevOps teams who evaluated application security only after development soon discovered that this process design was inherently flawed. First, when teams did discover security weaknesses they wanted to fix, doing so typically required reworking more code than would have been necessary had the vulnerabilities been discovered earlier. But worse yet, within this framework, budgetary and deadline pressures naturally induced teams to consider security in a superficial or cursory manner. And with only a single security check before deployment, application vulnerabilities were more likely to go undiscovered, leaving customers or the organization itself open to threats. But a key limitation of early DevOps efforts was that they often did not prioritize security as a concern, a mindset that was a continuation of a pre-DevOps approach.