The efficiency of DevOps for your enterprise will depend on the level of security you integrate in it. The integration of security into DevOps is new to many enterprises, but is highly important because the speed of DevOps can make the apps in development vulnerable to malicious attacks. This can be prevented with the help of right security controls.
Security and development teams must understand each other’s requirements and goals. Some might view security professionals as the ones who tap the brakes as the DevOps team moves forward. However, the job of security is to manage the risk effectively. To accomplish this, the security team must be integrated into the DevOps process.
In many companies, this is a completely new methodology, and different structures are needed for different companies. The global security function is a component of the program management ecosystem by one security model. Security is integrated as an essential member of the development organization by another security model.
Blockchain is the underlying technology behind cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and is used to secure the bitcoin wallet. The implementation of blockchain in a company’s DevOps process increases its agility and delivery efficiency, while the integration of security benefits an organization’s DevOps process in multiple ways. However, along with these benefits, few drawbacks do exist. Let’s dig deeper into both of them.
The Benefits and Drawbacks of Integrating Security into the Program Management Ecosystem
The program management function has a significant role to play in this model. It ensures that security is in place, and confirms that all the required specifications are documented and met. Security then carries out evaluations and determines what critical issues need to be addressed. In this security model, the security office can address the condition of a wide range of products that the organization delivers in a uniform manner.
The drawback is that the issues related to security often are listed on a slide for review by executives and noted by the most important person in the development organization. Consequently, the list becomes a road map for “what we must fix” more than a prescription for “what we must make sure the product sticks to before it gets shipped.”
The Benefits and Drawbacks of Integrating Security into the Dev Organization
If the security team is a component of the development organization, they must maintain close contact with the global security office. But they can be much closer to the product development. This means they are closely working with feature teams and determining stories that should be planned into the sprints.
These assessments cannot wait until the end—they must be planned into the first sprint that makes sense. Then, the resulting group of issues becomes technical backlog to prioritize into the following sprints. The goal is to produce applications that are safe for customers and have assessments that are known and can hold up to customer audit.
However, the local security team must connect strongly to the global security office. Every security team that is a component of the development organization must rise to act as a single brain across all the products; companies cannot have any variance with respect to adherence to mandates, assessments, tools and standards.
Where to Incorporate Security?
To enable a continuous security mindset, security must be covered by automated test cases related to security in the continuous deployment/continuous integration process over the following phases:
- Regular operations – near-real-time automated enforcement and utilization of continuous monitoring.
- Integration phase – full sanity checks for external/internal endpoints, and make sure any new workloads do not break any of the security policies.
- Infrastructure creation phase – test utilizing tooling such as serverspec/rspec.
- Image creation and hardening – as part of the delivery pipeline, automate this phase.
- Build phase – utilize code analysis.
Securing QE and Dev Labs
The final dimension is quality engineering (QE) and development, though they might be forgotten. Both of them have labs in which they make sure all the functionality performs, scales and works. These labs are good targets for intrusion, and security has a major role in the remediation and evaluation of the lab environment.
Conclusion
Adopting a DevOps methodology can instigate security vulnerabilities and new blind spots introduced by new systems. But fewer workplace silos and improved communication can help address issues much quicker. Today, security also can be integrated into DevOps using various technologies. It is highly essential to have security integrated into the process, no matter what method works best for your company.
