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We are a leading DevSecOps consulting company helping you achieve fast, continuous delivery (CI/CD) and consistent software quality with close collaboration between software engineers and IT operations by automating and optimizing your IT processes. We are one of the top DevSecOps service providers for accelerating your cloud operations.
The dedicated team of Sceptre Consultancy offers DevSecOps consulting services to assist your IT department in adopting DevSecOps best practices and accelerating the project at hand. Our enterprise DevSecOps consulting enables large and medium enterprises to accomplish quicker time to market, higher efficiency in development and operations, and better quality of software builds.
What is It & Why is It Important?
DevSecOps is a native DevOps extension. It aims to accelerate high-quality software delivery with automatic deployment, acceleration, and shutdown response. Apart from that, it helps in various functions in the software development life cycles (SDLC).
DevSecOps is a philosophy of integrating security processes within the DevOps process. DevSecOps involves creating a culture of ‘Security As a Code’ through continuous communication between release engineers and security teams. The DevSecOps movement, like DevOps itself, focuses on creating new solutions for complex software development processes.
Why is DevSecOps Important?
The goal of DevSecOps is to close the common gap between IT and security while ensuring fast and secure code delivery.
The successful implementation of DevSecOps looks like this:
- Includes safety tests in the CI / CD pipeline and throughout the SDLC. (instead of something done towards the end)
- It makes security everyone’s responsibility. For example, with the right tools, engineers should be able to view and address safety issues as part of their workflow and native environment.
- Automatically enable risk detection and correction with DevSecOps tools such as software composition analysis (SCA), DAST, SAST, and IAST.
What is the Impact of DevSecOps?
Integrating DevSecOps brings the best quality and secure software. Additionally, it can help improve the delivery speed of the software as security is part of the development and can’t be done later on.
The security measures available at DevSecOpshave many other benefits. These include:
- High speed and sharpness of defense teams
- Ability to respond to change and need urgently
- Better interaction and communication between groups
- Additional opportunities for automated construction and quality assurance testing
- Early detection of risk in code
- The assets of team members are released to operate in a high-value work
Getting started with DevSecOps
Cloud computing requires high-level security controls. An ongoing model of threat and system management is needed as technology-driven businesses are developing at a rapid pace.
Here are the key components of the DevSecOps approach:
Code analysis
Code analysis is the process of investigating the source code of an application for vulnerabilities and ensuring that it follows security best practices.
Change management
Software teams use change management tools to track, manage, and report on changes related to the software or requirements. This prevents inadvertent security vulnerabilities due to a software change.
Compliance management
Software teams ensure that the software complies with regulatory requirements. For example, developers can use AWS CloudHSM to demonstrate compliance with security, privacy, and anti-tamper regulations such as HIPAA, FedRAMP, and PCI.
Threat modeling
DevSecOps teams investigate security issues that might arise before and after deploying the application. They fix any known issues and release an updated version of the application.
Security training
Security training involves training software developers and operations teams with the latest security guidelines. This way, the development and operations teams can make independent security decisions when building and deploying the application.
- Security training – Train software and IT engineers with guidelines for established systems.
Why Adopt DevSecOps?
DevSecOps philosophies are different from traditional application security strategies.
In previous generations of software development, where alternative releases were common, security teams had a point of personal control at the end of the SDLC to review the code and ensure that the product was not compromised. Even when technology companies have begun to adopt DevOps principles, security reviews often occur in the final stages of the SDLC because pre-security testing tools were not friendly to developers; developers want command-line applications that are automated and easily integrated with their other stacks.
The negative effect of insecurity embedded throughout the CI / CD pipeline is that engineers may simply throw the problem “off the wall” given the pressure to post features and updates very quickly. However, finding risks in the final stages of the SDLC can be very costly, and this situation does not give you a culture of collaboration between security and development.
Both groups have the same goal of exporting a large product, yes, but often have a different modus operandi: development requires faster movement, while security should delay everything to ensure products are only shipped when they are secure.
DevSecOps closes this gap by extending continuous paradigms from DevOps to security, making it an active part of the CI / CD pipeline for automatic testing.
Finally, implementing DevSecOps principles is one of the least expensive ways to ensure your product is secure and reduces the burden on the security team – while still delivering software at a faster rate.
How can AWS support your DevSecOps implementation?
AWS supports modern DevSecOps practices so that software teams can automate their applications’ security, compliance, and data protection. For example, you can do the following:
- Amazon Inspector for automated and continual vulnerability management at scale.
- Security Hub is a cloud security posture management (CSPM) service that streamlines security operations with automated, continuous, security best practice checks against your AWS resources to help you identify misconfigurations.
- Amazon GuardDuty Continuously monitors AWS accounts and workloads for unauthorized or malicious behavior
- Identity and access management (IAM) Ensures that only authorized users can access AWS resources
- AWS Config Provides an inventory of AWS resources, configuration history, and configuration change notifications
- AWS WAF Acts as a gatekeeper for web applications to prevent vulnerabilities like XSS, SSRF, and SQL Injection
- AWS CloudTrail Helps with governance, compliance, and operational and risk auditing of AWS accounts
- Amazon Cognito A managed service that is protected by AWS global network security procedures
- AWS IAM Identity Center Simplifies access management across AWS accounts
- AWS Shield Helps prevent direct denial of service (DDoS) attacks
- AWS Secrets Manager Allows users to store and retrieve sensitive information like API keys and database credentials
- Amazon VPC Provision a logically isolated section of AWS where you can launch AWS resources in a virtual network that you define.
Best Ways To Build A Stable DevSecOps Pipeline
Below we will explore the best practices that will help you embrace DevSecOps principles and build a strong pipeline.
Planning and Training
Careful planning is essential for the successful use of DevSecOps. Injecting safety into an existing pipeline is a major cultural change as it is a technological process.
Accept Automation
Automation is one of the main principles of DevOps, and it is no different from DevSecOps. It is unreasonable to expect the security team to personally review all releases because of the speed at which companies are now pushing code into production.
Examine Your Dependence to Identify Risk
To keep up with the pace of innovation, developers no longer write a lot of patent code – up to 90% of parts of modern applications are open source.
Introduce a License Compliance Check
While it is not a safety net for each eye, licensing compliance is another area related to the use of open-source software where companies are at risk
Reliance on open source has different types of licenses. Also, OSS users who do not comply with the licensing terms may be subject to legal action. (Example: Stockfish vs. ChessBase.)