The DevOps trend is gathering pace, evolving from a niche to a mainstream strategy. Organizations are overcoming the barriers to successful implementation and finding real benefits in terms of speed and efficiency. But there are lingering issues to solve with regard to security. As companies look to push more changes to production more quickly, risks increase from multiple areas including integrating third-party software with known vulnerabilities, creating security defects in the code, not being able to fix the security issues that do arise and poor configuration.

According to the 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study from IBM and the Ponemon Institute, the average total cost of a data breach for participating companies increased 23 percent in the last two years to reach $3.79 million per breach. As DevOps presses ahead, security isn’t being considered often or early enough. Maybe a more “rugged” DevOps approach is needed.

Building in vulnerabilities

The vast majority of data breaches last year were entirely preventable. According to Verizon’s 2015 Data Breach Investigations Report, 99.9 percent of the exploited vulnerabilities were compromised more than a year after the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database, which lists known information security vulnerabilities and exposures, was published.

Developers frequently integrate open source code with third-party applications that have known vulnerabilities, providing would-be attackers with a way in. It’s difficult, time-consuming and expensive to close these loopholes after the fact.

Expand the DevOps mindset

We see many benefits when development and operations teams work closely together, so perhaps it’s time we applied the same logic to security and risk experts. Putting them into the DevOps mix earlier in the process could lead to an increase in empathy and understanding—and an injection of expertise at the outset that could save a lot of pain later in development.

Security and risk professionals can work directly with developers and operations to identify and remediate potential vulnerabilities. They can paint a picture of how to decrease the attack surface, set up alerts and boost response times.

Integrate automated security into your pipeline

If you can embed security goals into your continuous delivery processes, it should be possible to automate a lot of your security checks. Stick to the same principles as your wider development by making frequent, small, fast improvements to security. Automation can free up your security experts enough to find underlying weaknesses and tackle them.

The average organization receives almost 17,000 malware alerts in a typical week, but only 19 percent of those are deemed reliable, according to the Ponemon Institute, in this Malware Containment Report. This means two-thirds of security staff time is wasted because of faulty intelligence, at an average annual cost of $1.27 million. Only 41 percent of organizations have automated tools to capture intelligence and assess threats, but those that do report that 60 percent of malware containment can be handled without any human intervention.

It’s important that security professionals work directly with your developers and operations people to integrate vulnerability tests and security scans into your continuous delivery pipeline. They’re engaged in an ongoing battle with hackers, so make sure to continually review and tweak the tests that are run.

It also helps to have versioned definitions of all your systems, so you can readily and automatically scan for vulnerable systems when new vulnerabilities are announced.

Don’t forget to measure

Testing the effectiveness of your security measures is vital. Run penetration tests and employ destructive testing tools to see how well your processes stand up. Make sure you have clear remediation plans and that you can deploy quickly to roll back or forward to eliminate any vulnerabilities.

Security is too important to be an afterthought. We know there are lots of benefits to breaking down silos—let’s extend that beyond development and operations to include security. Build it into your continuous delivery pipeline and automate where possible, and you’ll get greater value from your security experts. You’ll also turn out better-quality software.

About the Author
Andrew Phillips is vice president, DevOps Strategy for XebiaLabs, a provider of automation software for DevOps and Continuous Delivery. He sits on the management team and drives product direction, positioning and planning.