DevOps is undeniable
DevOps is here to stay, and there is no denying it. As the whole technological structure of organizations is changing and advancing with time, DevOps has become a norm that organizations heavily rely on. Security, on the other hand, can not also be ignored as it is crucial for any company’s survival and like any other advancements, security needs to be upgraded as well. This is where SecDevOps comes into play.
Large organizations release regularly almost hundreds of updates on a daily basis. This means very rapid development is happening usually along with the agile development process, under the supervision a security team, such organizations can promise more secure releases initially and save a lot of resources like money and time. DevOps can actually end up being a huge advantage to security.
A collaborative culture with DevOps
A key point of having DevOps is to make a collaborative culture, which aims to find a work environment that is beneficial for all involved teams. The security of code is broken various times during the development process as developers discard many security tools for which they have no knowledge or training. And the whole development process keeps changing so rapidly that many tools can’t be adapted on the go. With DevOps, this whole scenario becomes easy and integration of security becomes seamless, as it becomes automated, so there really remains no choice whether to follow it or not as it is mandatory and is an easier approach for the whole team to follow.
Security throughout a business is provided by DevOps
DevOps actually help the security team to align the rest of the business.
The chances of redoing a task over and over again because it wasn’t done right the first time is minimized because of DevOps. And security testing which happens automatically upon every release helps catch issues and bugs much earlier in the development life cycle.
The time for breaking and entering a system is reduced because of having such an automated security approach through DevOps. And this also allows the development team to place in more policies and procedures to respond to any unwanted attack. Hence, the downtime for any system is lowered significantly.
DevOps enhances agile development
As more and more organizations are moving towards the Agile Development process, and it has almost become a norm for many huge organizations across the world.
But if security is neglected in the agile development process or even if it is not up to the standard, huge disasters might be faced later on which might be impossible to fix in the future.
The Agile approach needs proper security implementation in place for best results without any bugs or issues.
Its best to involve the security team in the development cycle from a very early stage, it helps to secure new releases from their point of view.
DevOps helps individual teams in bringing security in their relative developments and releases with these rapid responses from the involved security team.
Automation is king in DevOps
In DevOps, everything is focused to be as automated as possible. Thus automation can be seen throughout DevOps in every aspect including security.
By working alongside, the development team and the security team can make automated security processes that are run before each deployment ensuring minimal chances of breaks or bugs in the final build. This creates a new type of understanding between both the teams. And brings the traditional static analysis to its knees, replacing it with this new automated approach. Thus only the code which passes all the compliance standards is moved to live.
Security is spread throughout DevOps
Due to DevOps, every single developer and operations manager task is at some point passed through security. Since everyone involved in this software life cycle is now a part of the security mechanism, this actually frees up some load on the test teams themselves. As developers see the issue at hand and make some future amendments as well, and can give an idea to the security teams which new security rules can be defined by editing or enhancing already made ones. This creates a mutual understanding between developers, operation managers, and security teams. The overall security knowledge of the whole team is improved.
Monitoring with DevOps
The short sprints in the development life cycle allow for rapid improvement. Before integrating security with DevOps, the monitoring process was handled separately from security.
As everything is automated in DevOps, security can also be monitored automatically as well. With SecDevOps, monitoring for security vulnerabilities is easy in the early process, ensuring that most of the bugs could be found and presented at a very early stage during the development period. This decreases the chance of failures and hiccups in the later stage of deployment.
Eliminating bottlenecks with DevOps
Before DevOps, users used to trail the code and track manually the issues which were very time consuming and an unimportant, attention dividing task.
But ever since DevOps came into play teams can now communicate more openly and can work to solve issues more freely.
As communication, domain education is also necessary for DevOps.
For any organization that is following DevOps and providing something new in the market, it is essential to provide some premade security rules and easy-to-learn libraries, packages, toolchains and processes for the developers out there who might use in their work.
Conclusion
Thus all the above-mentioned points give you a little insight as to how DevOps can benefit a security organization and why it is crucial to have DevOps in place in any security organization at this time and age.
Not only DevOps provides a more structured approach to the software development life cycle but also enhances it marginally through automation, and when developing an enterprise level system you mostly rely on automation. Which is necessary and crucial to delivering a high-quality product in less time. But less time means more chances of failure or crashes, in any security organization crashes/failures, means the death of security or in some severe cases even death of the company itself.
To ensure a long and prospering life of a security organization DevOps training must come into play, even for those organizations which have survived so long without it. Because times are changing and it the tech world, it is all about changing with time.
