DevSecOps: Will It Help In Securing Our Applications And Software?

As new security threats are mounting each day, it’s getting challenging to cope with them. New innovations are required in order to save ourselves from huge data breaches. If we fail to do so, we, along with our organization, will turn into ashes and will be wiped out from the competition. We assume that to attain absolute security is easy and all we have to do is follow some predefined steps, but the reality is not even close! Securing data is more or less a journey, not a destination. Fortunately, professionals are coming up with new approaches to manage risk. They are not just evolving to meet the security challenges, but also bringing forward operational innovations to help us attain goals of cybersecurity. DevSecOps is another mindset that has evolved as knight in shining armour for security professionals.

What Is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps, Developer-Security-Operations, is culture perspective which is all about introducing security earlier in the life cycle of application or software development. This minimizes vulnerabilities and eventually brings security closer to the objectives. Simply put, when a software or application development is under process, everyone involved is equally responsible for the security. This way, security is embedded in the development process itself and no major changes are required in the code after development. DevSecOps empowers individuals with simple tools, and a low barrier to entry so that the experts can collectively achieve the objective without putting enormous efforts.

You might be wondering why is this even necessary? Well, it is! No doubt, we can leave security to one team but the development team is already aware of the code and everything cannot be left to be resolved at the last moment! Moreover, IT infrastructure has gone through several changes and we cannot ignore the shift to dynamic provisioning, Cloud Computing, shared resources, and others that have driven significant benefits. Thus, this practice is appreciable! The upsides of DevSecOps are unbelievably simple to understand! More automation and security checks from the beginning reduces the chance of misadministration and mistakes (the ones which lead to downtime or attacks). This also reduces the need for security architects to manually configure security consoles which is a huge relief.

Also Read: Why Is It Impossible To Escape From Getting Tracked?

 What Are The Principles Of DevSecOps?

There are several principles or characteristics that are valuable, here we’ll go through some of them:

Positioning: DevSecOps aims to help an organization to attain better security. In this, each security flaw is identified and is fixed separately to fill security gaps.  Also, this identifies vulnerable concerns ahead of time and ways to mitigate them can be found out.

Ruggedness: DevSecOps teaches ruggedness to the ones involved in coding. As no code is flawless, it strives to provide constructive feedback. This way one can at least attempt to stay one step ahead of attackers.

Situation awareness: DevSecOps requires logging, always. Every resource is logged, without exception. The reason behind is that without logs, it is more or less like shooting arrows in dark. One has to know what is happening along with how codes are tweaked in order to stay in control.

The diagram depicts a rough idea how we can work along with this practice, but a major question arises here and that is if this is the solution we are looking for? 

Is It Efficient Enough?

Some organizations are seeing positive results as a result of combining development, security and operations teams, shortening feedback loops, reducing incidents and improving security through shared responsibility. The experts working with firms have confirmed that this practice has helped them to release more secure codes. However, the time taken to code has seen an increase. The professionals convey that no doubt the security is taken care of, but if we try to implement this when deadline is knocking the doors, it may not turn out to be the most feasible option available!

Along with this, it increases the pressure both on developers and security specialists as they have to coordinate with each other. This consumes a lot of time and can become a cause of conflicts as well.

Also Read: No More Cyber Risks With Adaptive Authentication

To conclude we can say that there’s still a long way to go for DevSecOps and possibly attaining a highly secure environment as well! What do you think? Do let us know in the comments section below!