Dev, Ops and Security Collaboration: Bring the body and the mind will follow
Complexity has a way of muddying even the clearest of waters, and this has certainly been the case with IT Operations. While Dev, Ops and Security teams share a common purpose, the silos between them are so deeply entrenched, it’s easy to see how they have forgotten that they are working towards the same end. […]
Trust & the trusted image
What is Your Trust Model? Information security conversations often start with the question “What is your threat model?” This blog asks: “What is your trust model?”. Trust is a complex subject and an integral part of managing DevOps-oriented organizations and highly automated IT infrastructures. Who (developers, ops) or what (code, process) is trusted to accomplish […]
Protect and Defend: Repositories
When you’re creating work that gets deployed into production, there is typically a repository involved. It could be a code base, a deployment hub, a definitive software library, a library of VM or application templates, etc. Often, you may not think twice about what’s in these repositories or whether you can trust their content – […]
Hacking Your Auditor
No, not that kind of hacking, give me a little credit… Recently I was having a conversation with a consulting friend about DevOps, and he found himself in a bit of a tough situation. The organization he was working with was a pure cloud/DevOps shop, but one that was stepping into having the meet compliance […]
Logging Wins for Devops and Security
Its always great when companies can invest in tools that serve multiple groups and purposes. Ensuring proper setup and use of logs is one toolset that can serve both DevOps and Security. Why logs are important to DevOps DevOps use logs primarily to understand what’s going on inside an application server, database system or the […]
Organizational Dysfunction: The original vulnerability
During your teenage years, you may have figured out a way to get a ‘yes’ from your parents by playing off of the responsibility and knowledge gap between them…walking up to your mom and saying something like, “Hey Mom, Dad said he would drive me, can I go out tonight?” and then proceed to your […]
What is Security Policy Orchestration and Why Should DevOps Teams Care?
After attending the DevOps day I wrote about in my last post, I wanted to take a minute to explain exactly what Security Policy Orchestration actually is so we can begin to understand how the two concepts overlap. Simply put, Security Policy Orchestration is intelligent network change automation. It goes beyond simple task automation by […]
DevOps and Security Are Compatible
When I speak with information security organizations faced with the prospect of moving to DevOps, one of the most common fears I hear is that this transition will degrade security of infrastructure and applications. If you’re one of these folks, I understand this fear but you can rest assured: when you do things correctly security will […]
It’s the Outbound Stupid!
As nice as the word “Egress” may sound, I like “Outbound” better. Outbound is hardcore firewalling for the traffic that was initiated on the “trusted” side of the firewall, and is destined OUT to the unknown. However, over the last 20 years network administrators have put much more emphasis on what can come IN to their networks, rather […]
Security Policies For DevOps 101
A while back I was talking with some friends about how to ensure security inside a devops environment. The simple first thought was that no where does DevOps say to do away with security. Instead, consider how your existing information security practices and policies need to adjust given the changes that DevOps brings to the […]
Bootstrapping Chef (or Whatever) for Autoscaled EC2 Instances
I realize it is traditional to start writing a new blog with some background and a deep introspection as to the author’s personal motivation for writing said blog, but I’ve never been one for tradition. Thus, for my first official DevOps post, I think I’ll jump write in with a technical tutorial on a problem […]
Why Baking Security Into the DevOps Framework is Vital to Its Success
I attended my first official DevOps conference in Israel in September 2013. But I was initially introduced to DevOps by my customers – firewall and network managers who, through their efforts to automate security policy management, found themselves dealing with a new and like-minded set of IT stakeholders – DevOps teams. They said DevOps was […]
DevOps – A wake up call to security vendors
DevOps is changing the way IT works. Through a collaboration of development and IT teams, organizations can achieve tremendous scale at increased speed to deploy and maintain critical applications and infrastructure. The key technologies of virtualization and configuration automation have made this possible. Without these technologies, development may not slow down, but deployment would slow […]