What is DevSecOps? - 7 Best Practices for Effective Automation in 2021

DevSecOps is the theory of incorporating security activities within the process of DevOps.

Organizations support DevOps because it puts the fields of growth and operations closer together. This model of production provides a responsive and reliable way of continually delivering code to the real world while retaining necessary checks and balances.

One way to fix this vulnerability is the DevSecOps strategy, which guarantees that the security liability is not left to one or two participants. Instead, all aspects of the process are woven into security, depending on shared responsibility from production through operations, test automation, efficient communication and other techniques.

What is DevSecOps?

The theory of incorporating security activities within the process of DevOps is DevSecOps. It generates a new model called DevSecOps when protection is introduced into the DevOps process.

DevSecOps includes thought from the outset about the protection of the application and infrastructure. To sustain the DevOps strategy, it also includes automating individual security gates.

The Benefits of DevSecOps:

• Greater capability for automation
• Lowered chance of errors
• Reduced Manual Security Setup Requirement
• At an earlier stage in the process, more protection
• Protection that is designed explicitly for the product, not an add-on

Let's discuss the 7 DevSecOps best practices in order to handle security effectively in the DevOps model.

1. Automating security

The DevOps system is characterized by shared accountability, and the word DevSecOps applies the same attitude to security issues. Leverage the power of automation to make security testing easier, safer, and less disruptive.

For security testing and analysis in a DevSecOps sense, various test automation tools are available. From source code analysis to post-deployment and testing of integration, they do everything. Splunk, Metasploit, Tanium, Sonatype, Contrast Security are among them.

2. Using the right tools

Don't presume that you will be handling protection with current DevOps software. Many either have no safety features themselves, or they concentrate solely on the protection of the workflows between workers in production and operations.

Look for tools that can verify the security of code against established problems and, preferably, zero-day issues in real-time to adhere to DevSecOps best practices. Look also for capabilities for pen testing; these allow you to largely automate security testing.

3. Encrypt security between services with DevSecOps

A microservice-based architecture between the different services involved would rely on application programming interfaces (APIs). The security of the APIs, both in how the development team writes the service code and in the external services that are called, must be maintained and constantly checked.

In any service code, developers should have sufficient protection. The team of ops must ensure that APIs are tracked to maintain safe communications at all times.

4. Educate the developers

Security team members are also seen by developers as a roadblock, something that slows them down and prevents them from meeting deadlines. They gain a deeper understanding of why security is an essential part of the development cycle when you educate your developers on secure coding practices and why they are relevant.

5. Ensure protection between the device and the back-end 

While the emphasis in DevSecOps should be on the production and consumption of data, be sure to see how the access system and its user access the back-end services. Simple protection problems and solution approaches are no longer significant enough for general use. Do the following instead:

1. Implementing multi-factor authentication (MFA).
2. Using encryption for streams of data.
3. Tie the identity of the user into a granular directory system based not only on the person's name and location but also on where they are, the type of connexion used and the degree of access to the data of specified significance.

6. Use DevSecOps to put your request through security controls

Daily checking should be carried out on your submission. More rigorous research, such as stopping denial of service attacks, should also be performed.

In a solution, there can be bugs that are only apparent when that solution is broken. There are also real concerns that could be faced by the product owner.

7. Scale and track

Regardless of how many development teams you have working on different projects, the DevSecOps methodology needs to be flexible around the enterprise. Once you stick to the best practices mentioned above, scaling is simplified.

Automated testing, collaboration, and the use of DevSecOps pipeline management optimizing tools make application protection a repeatable and scalable process that can be implemented through the entire enterprise into a dedicated DevSecOps approach.

Conclusion

I hope this short guide helped you understand just what DevSecOps means and the benefits of it.

The technique of DevSecOps has gained traction because of the high cost of fixing security problems and secured debt. Security monitoring becomes more critical as Agile teams release applications more regularly. We hope that some of the best practices listed in this article will assist your business to switch from DevOps to a DevSecOps strategy.