Secrets to Enhancing Your DevSecOps Strategy

Building a successful DevSecOps strategy based on collaboration is key to its success.

First, what is DevSecOps? It’s is a practice that combines development, security and operations. It is an extension of DevOps and it advocates for integrating security at the outset of the development process–instead of waiting until the end.

Yet, even with cyber threats now a seemingly daily occurrence, many organizations still don’t believe a breach will happen to them, nor do they have a full understanding of the security implications. This makes them even more vulnerable.

Why DevSecOps Strategy Implementation Matters

DevSecOps can change that. When implemented, security is adopted at the beginning of a software or application development lifecycle and issues are addressed as they emerge within CI and CD pipelines.

Research has shown that the most important drivers of an organization’s adoption of DevSecOps include:

• Improving their ability to discover, profile and monitor a growing inventory of applications and APIs through automated processes;
• The need for more thorough code monitoring to better detect vulnerabilities throughout development, testing and operations;
• Driving a more robust security-centric culture for the organization;
• Better compliance monitoring.

To make the process more seamless, 75% of organizations either are using or plan to use automation in all or most areas of their DevOps ecosystem, according to Enterprise Strategy Group.

Working as a Team on DevSecOps Strategy and Initiatives

Like DevOps, DevSecOps offers many benefits, especially improved communication and collaboration among teams. However, achieving this can be tricky, because development teams, operations teams and security teams have grown accustomed to operating in their own silos.

Each team has different priorities: development teams are generally focused on speed and code quality, operations teams on making architecture stable and resilient, and security teams on extensive coverage to protect against weaknesses or vulnerabilities. A successful DevSecOps program blends all of these goals together so organizations can create applications at either the same or a faster pace — with a lot more security built in.

This will inevitably involve trade-offs for everyone involved, but prioritizing and aligning on the most important goals without increasing the security debt will help foster adoption. Collaboration is also critical and will be aided by the use of tools that enable users to work from a common source of truth.

Think of DevSecOps like that dreaded team project you had to do in high school: Everyone has a task and must not only pull their own weight but work together cohesively.

It is often said that the people part of the transformation framework is the most important part of any new tech initiative and teams that can work together is also the magic of successful DevSecOps. They can start by aligning on a common set of objectives and KPIs. This will obviously change the way each team works, and there may be some bumps in the road in the early stages. But for DevSecOps to truly work, everybody involved needs to keep their eyes on the prize and think of what is best for the organization.

While education and outreach are important, don’t underestimate the power of direct, one-on-one communication with developers, security specialists and sysadmins when working to move to a DevSecOps culture.

Given the shift to a remote and hybrid working model, using this tactic has grown even more important. This new way of working requires greater empathy and emphasis on communication and collaboration than ever.

Also key to a successful DevSecOps environment is making end-to-end visibility a key goal of your DevSecOps practice from the start and ensuring that all relevant teams have access to a dashboard not only of the data that is most relevant to them but also of what is going on with their counterparts.

DevSecOps is Worth the Effort

When done right, DevSecOps is not only beneficial to the security team, but it also helps developers increase productivity and deliver on-time and superior products. The organization benefits as well because DevSecOps can lower the threat of risks and deliver a higher quality security posture while also supporting the rapid pace of development.

For more on how to foster more successful collaboration and less friction with DevSecOps, read Rezilion’s latest white paper: Build Faster: DevSecOps Secrets for More Collaboration, Less Friction.