7 Things to Make DevSecOps a Reality

While talking about DevSecOps has become a hot trend, it is clear that many organizations claiming to follow such methodologies are actually mired in traditional waterfall development. Let’s figure out if you’re really ready to implement DevSecOps.

In a world that relies heavily on distributed computing and third-party services, security is paramount for those who want to remain competitive. From open source applications to operating systems developed, deploying, delivering and correcting application vulnerabilities must occur rapidly before breaches or compromises occur.

Here’s the good news: If your company practices authentic agile development and uses highly modular design patterns such as service-oriented architecture, you are well-positioned to achieve DevSecOps success. Why? Because you are already using key strategies that provide solid foundations for secure computing solutions, so you can immediately start experiencing the benefits that come from doing DevSecOps right.

Follow the Exact Recipe: Don’t Cherry-Pick Ingredients

DevSecOps emerged from people realizing that DevOps did not adequately highlight security concerns and security should be shifted farther left in the software development life cycle. You should think of DevSecOps as sweetening the existing “recipe” of DevOps by baking security in from the beginning without slowing down the development and release cycles. It may sound obvious, but increasing velocity while reducing risks will guarantee the release of better products because they are built with potential risks in mind (for instance, more and better error handling). This approach results in happier customers and repeat business, which will positively impact your bottom line.

DevSecOps Requires a Shift in Culture and Mindset

Let’s face it, the days of successfully deploying applications designed to meet business demands without embedding security controls early in the development life cycle are gone. Effective DevSecOps spans culture, practices and tools that break down silos, orchestrate integrated processes with automated tasks and simplifies security by bringing it out into the open. Instead of “security through obscurity,” boundaries and channels are clearly defined and narrowly focused.

The benefits of DevSecOps are many and include:

• Automating security review and application testing.
• Increasing the speed of delivery enhances product quality.
• Enhancing compliance with continuous monitoring and auditing.
• Fostering transparent and open cultures.
• Reducing costs, development church and application attacks.
• Delivering increased security and confidence.

A methodology that uses communication and collaboration to allow for dynamic development and deployment is crucial for responding to change and needs rapidly. When done right, this new mindset will make everyone in your organization accountable for security with a simultaneous mind and talent shift.

Putting DevSecOps Into Practice: A Checklist

An efficient DevSecOps program will require continuous management and developer education and process improvement through open collaboration, proactive monitoring and informed feedback. Here’s a short checklist to ensure you’re on the right path.

1. Build an Environment Conducive to DevSecOps: Engage leaders with a new mentality that makes it incumbent on leadership to understand engineering practices, so they know when things need shorting up. Deeply integrate management, so they support the necessary investments in tools and training while encouraging teams throughout the entire development life cycle.
2. Ensure Open Communication and Active Training: Promote collaboration and ongoing learning that leads to continuous improvement across the organization. Do this well by providing developers with the training and tools they need. Enable failing fast, early and often so you learn from it and create something useful.
3. Adopt a Security-Conscious Culture: The driving force behind DevSecOps requires security to be defined at the beginning of a project for repeatable, consistent use. This practice will help you respond to security needs and changes quickly while increasing team collaboration.
4. Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Without relying on manual processes, IaC helps manage and provision infrastructure automatically. This approach allows code to automatically be rolled out in a repeatable and consistent manner through a version-control system instead of relying on installation gurus and “component owners.”
5. Use Genuine Agile: Instead of cherry-picking from the agile approach and using your own form of agile-flavored waterfall—focus on practicing “Pure Agile.” This method includes detailed and frequent stakeholder involvement, “fail fast” practices and processes, a “meet the requirements” values and principles mindset and technical excellence.
6. Adhere to Modular Design Patterns Closely: While object-oriented design (OOD) and service-oriented architecture (SOA) mean different things to different people, the commonly understood key is decomposing large business problems into small business problems that can be addressed by discrete services through boundaryless information-flow sharing.  When done correctly, OOD and SOA will help your applications scale quickly while decreasing costs.
7. Favor Resource Management over Pride of Ownership:  There is a now-famous analogy about thinking of software components more like cattle than like pets.  While grim, the point is a salient one: When something fails, you should be able to quickly replace it with a new or improved component instead of trying to nurse the ailing component back to health. This mindset better promotes modularity and discreteness of purpose, which, in turn, leads to faster fix and restoration times.

As virtual environments and cloud usage grow, the need for DevSecOps to be done “the right way” is growing right along with it. But the sense of urgency to implement DevSecOps practices “the right way” hasn’t quite caught up yet. The challenge is to embrace all aspects of DevSecOps day in and day out, instead of just going through the motions of the select practices you adopted.

The call to action is clear: Now is the time for organizations to move the speed of delivery and secure code out of the textbooks and manifestos into the mainstream.