Mastering DevSecOps – enhancing security in continuous delivery 

DevSecOps integrates security into the DevOps workflow, ensuring early detection and mitigation of vulnerabilities, continuous security, and improved compliance. One key benefit is to ensure brand security, as robust security measures are crucial for maintaining customer trust.  

This proactive approach not only promotes innovation and agility, but also encourages DevSecOps adoption ultimately enhancing an organisation’s security posture and supporting a culture of shared responsibility and continuous improvement. 

Let’s begin by defining what DevSecOps is and exploring the benefits it offers for organisations of any size.  

What is DevSecOps?  

DevSecOps is an evolution of traditional DevOps, aiming to embed security into each phase of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), whether through automated means or manual interventions.  

Additionally, the responsibility for ensuring the security of a product is shared among all members involved in its development. In an enterprise, this can be spotted in different areas such as:  

• Integration into pipelines: Enterprises incorporate security practices seamlessly into their DevOps pipelines, ensuring that security is integrated at every stage of the software development process.  
  • This includes integrating security tools for code analysis, vulnerability scanning, and compliance checks into automated build and deployment processes.  
• Security automation: Enterprises leverage automation to streamline security processes and ensure consistency and repeatability. This includes automating security testing, configuration management, and compliance checks to identify and remediate vulnerabilities efficiently.  
• Governance: Enterprises adhere to regulatory requirements and industry standards by incorporating compliance checks and security controls, this is also known as security baselines and it can include cloud providers, operating systems, process orchestrators such as Kubernetes. This ensures that software development practices align with regulatory mandates and organisational security policies.  
• Monitoring: Enterprises implement continuous monitoring practices to detect and respond to security threats in real-time. This involves monitoring production systems, analysing security metrics, and providing feedback to development teams for rapid remediation of security issues.  
• Training: Enterprises invest in security training and educational programs to equip development, operations, and security teams with the knowledge and skills needed to implement DevSecOps practices effectively. This includes providing training on secure coding practices, threat modelling, and security tooling.  

Overall, DevSecOps in enterprises extends across multiple dimensions of the software development lifecycle, organisational culture, and contributors. It is more than just processes and automations. Culture and training also significantly influence the effectiveness of your DevSecOps implementation.  

The goal is to identify and rectify security vulnerabilities early in the development process, rather than waiting until the product is live.  

Enterprises that implement DevSecOps not only enjoy benefits like reduced risk of data breaches and improved governance compliance but also demonstrate enhanced readiness to tackle critical security vulnerabilities head-on.  

Take, for instance, the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug (CVE-2014-0160), Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228), and the recent series of Spring Framework remote code execution vulnerabilities (CVE-2022-22965 and CVE-2022-22963).  

These vulnerabilities, discovered months after the release of the affected libraries, posed significant threats to millions of workloads across various enterprises. However, enterprises with robust DevSecOps practices were better equipped to respond effectively to these challenges.  

Instead of dealing with a “stop-the-world” scenario that demands everyone’s attention and crisis meetings, they could quickly detect, mitigate, and fix vulnerabilities. This approach minimizes disruptions to ongoing development and keeps operations running smoothly. This exemplifies how maturity in DevSecOps enables enterprises to navigate and mitigate security risks more efficiently, safeguarding their systems and data with confidence.  

How to implement DevSecOps in your enterprise 

Before diving into tools and products, I recommend that enterprises first cultivate a DevSecOps culture. This means fostering a collaborative environment within the current organizational setup, where everyone takes part in security efforts.  

As a result, all team members involved in the software lifecycle should be trained to understand the security governance, tools, and processes that will be part of the development workflow. This will result in a better understanding of the tools and processes that enterprises might acquire to ease this process. 

The following items pinpoint the phases:  

1. Define the collaboration processes  

Establishing effective collaboration processes is paramount for the successful implementation of DevSecOps within any organisation.  

This step outlines how the shared security responsibility model will work and how everyone involved in the software development lifecycle will contribute to its success.  

For example, it involves defining how security policies will be created and reviewed by everyone involved in the software development lifecycle, as well as determining the frequency of policy reviews and the process for addressing runtime security bugs.  

Additionally, it entails outlining how exceptions will be handled and how new cloud providers, tools, libraries, or others will be integrated into the software development lifecycle.  

2. Define your security baselines  

As an enterprise, it is essential to establish all security considerations inherent in your software development process. This includes aspects ranging from your codebase and dependencies to the runtime environment (including cloud providers).  

For example, these documents include policies such as determining the frequency of required operating system patches, the retention period for container images or VM images, the enterprise data classification (public, private, sensitive, confidential, top secret), and the corresponding security requirements for each classification level.  

3. Monitor  

It’s important to establish a measurable baseline based on your security policies. These monitoring systems will then automatically check which resources comply with your policies and which do not.  

4. Automate  

By leveraging products or internal tools and employing your measures, you can start increasing the number of compliant resources.  

For example, if outdated container images are used in your production environments, a bot that creates pull requests to update dependencies can increase the number of releases.  

Or, if your cloud resources fail to meet compliance standards, you could provide certified infrastructure as code files to create these resources or integrate an internal development platform (IDP) enabling developers to create compliant resources.  

Keep in mind that it’s not just about having the right security tools; your workloads also need to have solid test coverage. This will give you the confidence and speed to implement security updates effectively.  

5. Continuous improvements  

Make sure that your policies and procedures are constantly reviewed to take advantage of latest changes in the industry. 

Lessons learnt  

The implementation of DevSecOps is a journey. There is no magic tool that, once installed, ensures your enterprise’s security. It requires a cultural shift to successfully implement and integrate it into your organisation.  

You can assess whether resources are compliant, but it’s important to ensure the process doesn’t create excessive work. A positive developer experience is key. Always remember the human factor and the natural resistance to change. 

Strategic automation and policy alignment

The automation plan must be strategic. Utilise your data to determine where to enhance developer productivity by reducing repetitive tasks. Avoid attempting to automate everything simultaneously, as this could lead to a negative developer experience. You will know that your security transformation is working If developers fully embrace DevSecOps and they will actively drive or request new ways to comply with company policies and automate repetitive tasks.  

Regularly reviewing and updating your policies to align with your tools is essential. Innovation in various areas will improve the development process and ease operational challenges. 

Benchmarks and Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

When setting up security policies, make sure they can be monitored automatically. Overly relying on manual processes can hinder the success of your DevSecOps efforts. Start with standard benchmarks and build on them to meet your business needs. 

For example, AWS (Amazon Web Services) offers the Center for Internet Security (CIS) AWS Foundations Benchmark, which provides a set of industry-recognised security configuration best practices. These best practices offer clear, step-by-step implementation and assessment procedures. Covering operating systems, cloud services, and network devices, the controls outlined in this benchmark help safeguard the specific systems utilised by your organisation.  

Similarly, you can find baseline recommendations for other cloud services, such as the Centre for Internet Security (CIS) Microsoft Azure Foundations Benchmark.  

Embrace Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and develop strong practices for its use. Provide certified templates that are easy to share and maintain, ensuring they align with your organisation’s security policies. Automate security checks for these templates to simplify compliance and improve security. 

As part of this evolution, consider implementing an internal developer platform (IDP) designed to facilitate the utilisation of standardised templates. This platform can serve as a centralised hub for developers to access, customise, and deploy infrastructure resources in a secure and efficient manner.  

By adopting IaC and using certified templates with automated security checks, you can enable your teams to build and manage infrastructure confidently and efficiently. 

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