Implementation
What is DevSecOps? It’s a philosophy that makes everyone in your organization responsible for enhancing security. Everyone is supposed to implement security decisions and actions in tandem with the speed of implementing development and operations actions and decisions.
DevSecOps stands for Development, Security, and Operations. It integrates security in software development processes right from the early stages. This philosophy identifies and closes all security loopholes to hasten and secure development processes.
But how do you implement it in your team? This post discusses the leading best practices that will help you implement it successfully. Keep reading and learning more.
- Train Your Developers on Secure Coding
Start by training your developers in all matters regarding secure coding because coding lies at the center of security. That’s why security is placed in between development and operations. Introducing security dimensions into your developers’ training provides them with the necessary tools and best practices for enhancing security. You can rest assured that every team member will get it right if your developers do the same.
- Thoughtful Automation
Thoughtful automation is another best practice that will boost your DevSecOps implementation, especially when automating security testing. You could waste much of your working time and energy running automated scanning on entire app source codes daily. It could even blur your ability to follow any significant daily change. Instead, you can do the testing every night by scanning only items relevant to the changes that occurred to your codes during the day.
It’s even more beneficial if you embed automated dynamic security testing (DAST) into your development’s lifecycle. This option is better since it identifies potential security threats in your codes and searches for real-time threats as the app is running.
- Enhance Communication Across Various Teams
DevSecOps is an all-inclusive concept. Thus, there must be effective communication across all the teams in your organization. It’s impossible to get everyone on board when communication doors are closed. You can implement metrics and dashboards to guarantee communication transparency. This way, your team will enjoy improved response times.
Moreover, efficient communication allows your security team to communicate detected security threats on time. Consequently, prompt reporting will facilitate quick patch fixing.
- Never Ignore Threats and Vulnerabilities
Your implementation will succeed if you never ignore threats and vulnerabilities. Using code analysis is beneficial whenever you update your code to detect vulnerabilities and allow the security team to respond swiftly.
- Implement Threat Modelling Mechanisms
Implementing threat modeling mechanisms is critical because it enables developers to view an app development process from an attacker’s position. This way, software engineers are more cautious when writing codes.
Threat modeling mechanisms also help you detect potential vulnerabilities in your design, an element a routine security check could easily miss. Lastly, these mechanisms enable your security team to understand your internal assets’ vulnerabilities to potential attacks.
- Don’t Leave Anyone Behind
Since DevSecOps includes every team member, it’s critical to embrace an “all or none” approach when looking at stakeholders. You are most likely to achieve very little success if you have expert designers at the peak but leave the other team members behind.
Include everyone from the top management to the lowest-ranked team member. It becomes easier for everyone to take responsibility for their actions or inactions when they “own” the process. Otherwise, they will disown the finished product.
- Compliance
Compliance is critical to your implementation’s success. However, don’t make it a paper-based routine. Go ahead and create metadata that represents your compliance requirements and integrate it into your assets. Security policy automation can use them to tag your assets to execute your envisioned security ecosystem, enabling you to respond to security threats faster.
- Progressive Integration and Deployment
Lastly, progressive integration enables you to identify all integration threats and fix them early. Eventually, you enjoy enhanced collaboration within your team and deliver the best app solutions. Continuous deployment helps your engineers the time to balance between identifying and creating new features during the production stage.