Despite the continued adoption of enterprise DevOps practices, some organizations, especially those in highly-regulated industries remain cautious about moving forward too quickly.
“There’s no doubt that DevOps brings benefits for some organizations,” says Martin Fisher, director of information security at Atlanta-based WellStar Health System. “However, many pushing for DevOps underestimate the amount of technological and cultural change that is necessary to overcome before moving ahead to boldly, especially among those in security and regulatory compliance roles that are concerned with securing and auditing processes they see as they’re potentially losing control over,” Fisher says. “You can’t audit and secure what you can’t control,” he says.
Eric Cowperthwaite, former chief information security officer at Providence Health and Services agrees. “There are some who want to move too fast. In many organizations the culture just isn’t yet there, especially where they are used to very rigid quality assurance and audit controls,” says Cowperthwaite, currently a VP at Core Security.
It’s certainly not uncommon to find chief security officers in heavily regulated industries who are concerned that the move to DevOps is an excuse to cut corners and move more quickly by cutting out necessary oversight. “You’ll find if you have a developer that’s producing a dozen mistakes a day, if you poke at them about it then you’ll find out that they’re tired of the structure, of the bureaucracy,” he says. “DevOps need to be done in a mindful and thoughtful way,” Fisher says.
Cowperthwaite agrees, and contends that in certain environments DevOps will be – should be – taken slowly. “You have legacy systems and very highly audited and controlled systems where DevOps is just not going to flow for some time,” he says.
It’s not just the cultural shift, but also the shift in necessary for good governance capabilities to keep up, they contend. “Not all systems are geared to handle 200 commits a day, nor do they have the ability for reasonable tracking and accountability for that kind of speed. In fact, there are many legacy systems were it’s not even possible at all,” Fisher says.
However, not that all companies that move toward DevOps are attempting to automate everything – at least not at first. But it is higher levels of automation most certainly seek. A survey recently conducted by automated server management software provider JumpCloud found that many companies are turning to DevOps to automate time consuming activity, such as deployment, patching, user management, log file analysis, and forensics activities.
Some of the trepidation is warranted, to be sure, and some of it may be due to the media and industry focus on the outlier DevOp implementers. “I think, justifiably, a lot of the fear comes from the fact that a lot of the companies that have gotten the most press regarding DevOps are doing things that are radically different than what is going on within the bulk of IT work at traditional enterprises such as banks, healthcare, and organizations like that,” says David Mortman, chief security architect and distinguished engineer at Dell Software Enstratius.
When it comes to enterprises with trepidations when moving toward DevOps, all of the interviewees we spoke with agreed the key is to move slow. But still move and develop the culture and the toolsets slowly. “Pick one system that is separate and use it as a concept,” Fisher advises. “The DevOps ‘true believers’ are given a hall pass to fully run their systems and group in a DevOps model. As they learn and improve you slowly assimilate into the broader environment,” he says.
Mortman sees it in a similar way, but notes that it’s not just about technology and absolute speed, but also collaboration, culture, and relative speed. “How fast is fast for your organization? If you’re only making changes to your big medical records database every 18 months, and you switch to every three months – that’s faster. That’s more continuous deployment than you were doing before. No one has to jump right in,” Mortman says.
“I started working with those sort of DevOps-y concepts back before I was aware of the term “DevOps,” Mortman adds. “I was calling it “Agile InfoSec” and “Agile Ops.” And with that mindset, even the most regulated, paranoid enterprise can embrace DevOps. Start with small, modestly achievable goals and build from there. Collaborate and more tightly integrate the teams.
