Have you heard about DevSecOps? If this is the first time you’re hearing about it, then you’ve come to the right place. Here, we’re going to take a look at what DevSecOps is and how different and similar it is in some ways with its older sibling, DevOps.
But before we delve into everything DevSecOps, let’s take a quick look at DevOps in its fundamental definition. Many understand DevOps as an approach to overhaul an entire organisation’s work environment and culture through the use of automation and tools that provide them with the agility that they need in order to keep up with the pace and ever changing demands of the digital market.
At its core, DevOps is the entire process of improving teamwork and team collaboration between Development and Operations, by improving the way that work is delivered and feedback is given from both sides. Improvements are delivered through automation by making the work visible so that both front and back end teams are on the same page and are moving at the same pace as they work together. The ultimate goal of DevOps is to create a culture that fosters learning, continuous improvement, and mindful use of resources, while maintaining a healthy work environment that helps everyone become more productive and more encouraged to work the best way they can.
DevSecOps, by fundamental definition, is the approach of bringing together three teams into one common plane: development, security, and operations. DevSecOps brings focus and priority to integrating security into the building and testing work of the developers. This brings developers, security engineers, and operations to work together in one collaborative team effort as all three sides work to create better, more reliable code following a more agile work structure.
What is DevSecOps and How Does it Work?
DevSecOps is the way of integrating security practices with the current DevOps practices. It brings emphasis on the importance of building code with security embedded in it, which is essential in testing and catching errors during development, production, as well establishing security measures to protect and ensure the reliability of the product post production. DevSecOps aims to make security a necessity for any product development, and not simply an option or an after thought, or worse, simply a waste of precious time.
Making the Shift to a DevSecOps State of Mind
The trend in software development is continuously staying on the path of agile work methods and cloud computing. This is why it is important to strengthen and improve security methods that are currently in place with the traditional development practices. While DevOps works to transform the culture within entire organisations by improving team collaboration, making work visible, improving value streams as well as the development of tool chains, DevSecOps works to transform the way developers build code and improve the collaboration among the dev team, the security engineers, as well as ops, to better understand the the value of security in a software development life-cycle, from start to end.
What’s in it for the DevSecOps Team?
Perhaps the biggest benefit of integrating security into the build is that it yields a more reliable code through rigid and systematic testing. This method ensures that flaws are caught and corrected before the code reaches production. This practice also allows next level testing during production and allow teams to track issues quicker and deploy solutions faster, to ensure a flawless finished product. Other important benefits of inserting security into the current DevOps practices include:
Increase in the ability to address issues quickly
Testing is the best form of establishing security in the development life-cycle of a product. It is through testing that developers can catch vulnerabilities of the code at every stage of the building process and it is through this exercise that security engineers are able to create tests based on real life and hypothetical scenarios, to which the code is exposed to, in order to reveal any unrealised or unexpected vulnerabilities that the code may have and allow devs and engineers to resolve the issue quicker and accurately.