How To Bring Security and Development Together In Harmony

If you’re looking at things from the development side, the motto when working to build software products would be “ship it”—get it out the door and into the hands of users as soon as possible.

From the perspective of the security team, the maxim would be “secure it”—make sure the code is as free of vulnerabilities as possible and is ready for safe use before it ever reaches users.

The fact is, there’s a way to meld these priorities into the goal of “secure it—ship it,” and the shift doesn’t involve an enormous cost in terms of infrastructure investment. What it requires is a new way of thinking and acting among development and security teams, and the willingness to work together toward the common goal of delivering secure software as quickly as possible.

To a large degree, the thinking among development teams has been to move code and applications out at the fastest possible speed, regardless of how secure it is. That makes sense, given how much pressure teams are under to create products quickly in a highly competitive digital market.

Development delays, at a time when a company’s customers or internal users want new capabilities and upgrades delivered quickly, do not go over well with them or with senior executives at the company and perhaps its stockholders. Slow, methodical development processes are not welcome in today’s hyper-competitive environment.

On the other hand, the thinking among security teams is that ensuring the security of the software should be a major priority, given how many vulnerabilities slip through and are later exploited by cyber criminals to break into organizations’ networks and systems. No product should ever be declared ready for production until it’s declared safe, according to their world view.

By shifting both of these thought processes a bit and deploying tools that enable security to be built into software products efficiently at the earliest stages of development, organizations can have the best of both worlds.

Secure it. Ship It. The Path to DevSecOps Harmony

Developments in the market are helping to make the secure it—ship it concept a reality. In March, Rezilion announced an integration with GitLab, the DevOps platform, which enhances developers’ ability to release secure software products faster. Deployable within minutes, the native integration with GitLab CI eliminates an organization’s vulnerability backlog by 70%, and reduces remediation from months to days while addressing 100% of exploitable risk.

GitLab surfaces potential vulnerabilities within the CI pipeline, yet developers might spend time patching vulnerabilities that don’t pose any actual risk. By using Rezilion in GitLab CI, companies can understand which vulnerabilities are loaded to memory and executed in runtime. Having this ability means they can focus on true risks instead of spending time on vulnerabilities that are not exploitable.

Adding Rezilion to GitLab CI seamlessly integrates into developers’ existing workflows and reduces the time they need to spend addressing vulnerabilities in the software development life cycle (SDLC). As code is tested and scanned for vulnerabilities, developers can see within their Gitlab user interface which vulnerabilities require their attention while non-exploitable vulnerabilities are marked as “false positives” that shouldn’t hold back releases.

In addition, teams can get a clear view of all the software components in use with Rezilion’s dynamic software bill of materials (SBOM), to understand which software components are vulnerable in the specific runtime context of their environment.

With Rezilion’s enhanced runtime vulnerability validation technology, the GitLab integration extends the ability of developers, security teams, DevSecOps teams DevOps teams to have a continuous view of their actual attack surface. It allows them to prioritize their remediation efforts on the vulnerabilities and weaknesses that present the most risk.

Get On the Road to Security In CI

With the ability to make security a part of software development from the very beginning, organizations can embrace the new goal of secure it—ship it. The GitLab CI and Rezilion partnership is the answer to meet the needs and demands of modern developers and security teams. Learn more and visit our GitLab partner page to start your free trial today.