What Should You Know About DevSecOps Practices?

Today, every business needs to actively deploy security measures and protect its sensitive data to survive the current digital environment. It upholds brand reputation and trust while guaranteeing user safety and the integrity of corporate operations. As a result, organizations are moving more and more toward better development procedures, cutting-edge technologies, and more robust access controls.

By integrating security into every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), DevSecOps lowers the possibility of releasing code with cyber vulnerabilities. Addressing security concerns before the outset of the project is the aim. Through cooperation, automation, and well-defined procedures, it enables teams to share accountability for security.

In practice, this means teams discuss security implications during planning and begin testing for security issues in SDLC environments, rather than waiting until the end. DevSecOps helps your organization remain competitive, prioritizing the delivery of smaller packets of high-quality code rather than feature-rich projects that take longer.  

Read a complete DevSecOps implementation guide to ensure security.

Things to Know About DevSecOps Best Practices

The DevSecOps practices have become very important for businesses,  reducing the risk of deploying software with misconfigurations and other vulnerabilities. It includes planning and development, build and test, and production, all of which are included in each DevSecps project. Teams employ automation to continually integrate, continuously test for security threats, and constantly address quality assurance issues throughout the sprint.

Here are key highlights that you must know about DevSecOps practices:

 Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Scanning

Instead of managing and provisioning networks, virtual machines, and load balancers manually, DevSecOps teams should employ open source technologies to increase productivity. Such technologies assist in ensuring that hundreds or thousands of servers have a consistent infrastructure setup and updates. Infrastructure as a code scanning solutions automatically evaluate the infrastructure at the code level for noncompliance with security policies and standards in order to lower the chance that misconfigurations are released to the production environment.

Static Application Security Testing

Before the developer’s code is compiled, the DevSecOps team should begin testing their custom code for security vulnerabilities. This helps them fix issues without affecting the build. Static application security testing tools make this process easier. However, teams must calibrate these tools to minimize false positives, ensuring non-issues don't block developers. Many DevSecOps security tools identify exactly which code is risky and offer suggested fixes.

Software Composition Analysis

Using third-party modules and plug-ins can help teams develop features and apps more quickly. Although these prebuilt tools save time, they may also come with dangers like badly written code, licensing problems, or security flaws. Software composition analysis tools should identify open source components in applications and evaluate them against proprietary or free databases to detect license violations and security and quality issues.

Container Scanning

Containers are widely used while implementing DevSecOps. It helps developers easily deploy self-contained units of code for the SDLC; however, within a container is a container image that includes the code that runs processes for the container. These images are often built using existing images or pulled from public repositories. Container scanning tools should scan containers and compare them against public or proprietary vulnerability databases to uncover potential security issues.

Dynamic Application Security Testing

A malicious actor can employ an attack on an application that is simulated via dynamic application security testing. Based on predetermined use scenarios, this testing should take place while the application is operating.

Additionally, you should be mindful of the following:

Specify the Metrics and Requirements

Set a baseline for minimum security. After you've established your requirements, decide the metrics you want to monitor in order to keep track of your progress. Also, you should start small. Be judicious about which tools you implement and how many issues you scan for. 

Change the Culture

Acknowledge that disagreements may occur and that it may be difficult for people to change the way they work. Clearly convey the standards of DevSecOps in the CI/CD pipeline, offer chances for candid conversation, and be prepared to make changes until teams discover the processes, resources, and cadence that suit them the best.

Perform Threat Modeling

Develop a threat modeling process, which can be as simple or as detailed and technical as you need it to be. Use this approach to document a realistic security view of your application that includes:

• How attackers can abuse the application's design.
• How to fix vulnerabilities.
• Priority of different issues.

Manage Dependencies

To create apps quickly, the majority of developers employ libraries and third-party packages. The issue is that some of these solutions have security holes, and developers aren't always careful to update them. Make sure the components you employ are screened for security threats and create a systematic procedure for updating them to lower your risk.

Conclusion

With many methods attackers use to gain access to an organization’s data and assets, a common tactic is to exploit software vulnerabilities, and such software breaches are costly and time-consuming for any organization. Depending on the severity, it may also be damaging to a company’s reputation. Now, no one wants to leave fixing security vulnerabilities to the end when issues can be much more difficult and costly to address. In the DevSecOps framework, not only does the entire team take responsibility for quality assurance and code integration, but also for security. You can also choose analytics data and threat intelligence monitoring to help you determine if there are security needs that aren’t being met by your current approach.

If you, too, are interested in implementing DevSecOps in your organization, contact us now. We are a leading web development company with more than a decade of experience in the service. Moreover, our 24*7 customer support and maintenance services never leave you stranded.