Driven by the encouragement from 2018 progress, cloud technology is poised to be even bigger in 2019. However, one major hurdle continues to haunt the cloud trend: security.

An overwhelming number of firms in the IT industry are preparing for cloud adoption, yet security continues to be a big question for many of them. Early DevOps adopters faced a similar challenge in their early stages of DevOps implementation. They relied on a wide variety of DevOps tools to address their issue completely.

Today, however, DevSecOps is making a big difference in the IT industry, including security and ensuring a seamless software development life cycle (SDLC).

Breaking the regular trend of having security as a separate process, DevSecOps calls for security integration across all stages of the software process chain, addressing security concerns at the very first instance of every stage.

The same DevSecOps now comes as a savior for cloud, too.

Applying DevSecOps to Cloud

Last year saw the cloud market taking a new position in the IT industry, driven by the wide penetration of leading cloud computing service providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud, among others.

To stay relevant in today’s market, many IT firms have begun their efforts to achieve high and highly scalable performance with all-round digital transformation.

Yet, security limitations associated with cloud continues to be a concern many of these organizations. DevSecOps principles can help. Many research reports show that the majority of firms working on the cloud have high reliability on DevSecOps tools and principles for improved agility and high reliability.

DevSecOps approach to cloud security requires detailed planning that might even demand cultural change in an IT environment, especially for security automation and configuration of cloud assets.

The planning requires security teams to:

• Collaborate with development teams as they move code to cloud alongside close monitoring of quality in the production cycle.
• Work with the quality analysis and development teams in deciding qualifier and parameter aspects required for code promotion.

Overall, DevSecOps principles offer security advantage along with software agility and high reliability across the life cycle.

Implementing DevSecOps in Cloud

Following six factors decide the success of DevSecOps implementation in a cloud environment:

1. Code Analysis – Continuous improvements to software mean revisiting code, which also reflects in code analysis, quality assurance and delivery cycles.
2. Automated Testing – Automated testing minimizes efforts and also saves time. As a key aspect of DevSecOps process, automated testing makes the testing process easier through easy execution of repeatable cases.
3. Change Management – Linking teams and making them aware of each other’s operations, wherever required, is an important aspect of change management. Keeping developers informed about security-related activities helps in timely address of existing and possible vulnerabilities.
4. Compliance Monitoring – Compliance continues to play a key role in an organization’s growth path as part of corporate governance. Regulations help in the creation of code and also in modifying the source code. This helps in real time at times of audit.
5. Threat Investigation –  Threat investigation is important to defining the security readiness of any organization. It’s important for organizations to have a close and continuous watch on discovering possible threats, regular security scans and code reviews to address security challenges.
6. Personnel Training – Holding hands-on training sessions and certification courses build the company’s strength, equipping teams with appropriate domain knowledge.

The above-mentioned six steps act as building blocks for implementing DevSecOps strategy in cloud. What’s next? The implementation part: Get DevSecOps to cloud.

— Veritis