Implementing DevSecOps Goes Beyond Technology

While technology is crucial for implementing DevSecOps, it is the people, processes and culture that drive it forward. As recently as last year, a survey found 58% of technology leaders cited existing culture and lack of skills as hurdles to being able to embed security testing and evaluation within software development processes. That report found that only about one in four companies strongly agreed their organization’s culture and practices supported collaboration across development, operations and security.

A separate recent survey on DevSecOps skills, conducted in partnership with DevOps.com, found 70% of respondents said the security education they received is not adequate for what their current positions require.

Plenty of similar statistics can be found, and they point to a recurring theme–education, training and support for developers and security teams are as critical as modern application security solutions in implementing DevSecOps.

Automation Can Help Overcome Challenges

Most developers want to create high quality, secure code. Often, the problem is developers have never had formal training in what secure coding is, in either traditional education or while on the job. The good news is more organizations are starting to provide that training for development teams. As development and release cycles speed up, developers need to find ways to incorporate security testing in less intrusive ways.

In addition, development teams are gaining some control over budgets directed toward application security tools. Legacy tools for testing code and assessing application security risk simply weren’t built for the speed DevOps testing requires. Whenever evaluating new security analysis tools for a development team, automation should be top of mind. Static analysis tests the application code for a broad range of security flaws, and it can be fully automated into both the IDE and continuous integration (CI) processes. In the IDE, it provides early security guidance and education to software engineers while they are coding by highlighting potential vulnerabilities and suggesting best practices.

Companies can also reduce friction by ensuring developers don’t have to go out of their way to run the security tool. Development teams should be able to view and triage the results and take advantage of plugins and/or APIs to integrate security tools seamlessly into toolchains they are already using. This means there will likely be no one-size-fits-all approach that can be dropped into any dev team; rather, take the time to understand how that team works currently, and work with them to introduce the security tools in the least disruptive way.

Shifting Mentalities

One of the biggest challenges is asking developers to do something they weren’t doing before. With DevSecOps, it may seem like dev teams are being asked to take on more work, but in reality, the organization is replacing unplanned work with planned work. Rather than address defects late in the release cycle, development teams are scanning for and addressing flaws early on. Such a cultural shift can be plodding, but developers and development managers should realize embedding security this way will be more efficient and more secure while also reducing their unplanned work.

Giving development teams more autonomy over security tasks can also be daunting for security practitioners, but in order to facilitate shorter development iterations, security has to relinquish some control and also reconsider how they think about risk tolerance within the context of the business. Historically, the relationship between developers and security practitioners has been adversarial, but DevOps and DevSecOps methodologies have made it more cooperative. Still, many security teams are uncomfortable with the thought of giving up control.

Adapting to Avoid Adding New Technical Debt

Even with the understanding that producing more secure code benefits both development and security, reducing technical debt is gradual and starts with integrating security directly into the development process. It may seem convenient to lump security findings in with technical debt with the intention of getting to it someday, but it’s not practical to let security debt pile up.

Organizations are decentralizing security work, particularly via security champions: One or two people on each development team who serve as the eyes and ears of product security, taking ownership of some of the day-to-day tasks that would have previously been bottlenecked on the security team. A security champion could help with security code reviews or coach others on their team on how to fix security issues. Sharing responsibility for security in this way can further bridge the gap between security and development teams, reducing the workload of the security team while allowing development teams to be more self-sufficient.

For developers, context switching has a productivity cost. If they find out about a security defect while they are actively working on that particular feature or section of code, it’s only minimally disruptive and can be fixed quickly. By contrast, if they discover the same security defect two weeks later, after they’ve moved on to a completely different feature, they’ll incur the cost of context switching back to the earlier feature before they can fix the flaw correctly. Over the long run, finding and fixing flaws early in the SDLC should not meaningfully delay time to market.

Here are some best practices in implementing DevSecOps in your organization.

1. Embed Security Processes Early in the Development Cycle

Ensure scans are baked in at every stage of the software development process and work with your development teams to integrate security within existing workflows and tools. By the time software is pushed to production, code should have been scanned multiple times and all vulnerabilities should be fixed. Research has shown the frequency of security scans during the development process correlates to fix velocity. Specifically, businesses that do daily scans fix vulnerabilities 11.5 times faster than the typical organization.

2. Give Security Responsibility Directly to Development Teams

Developers need to take ownership of the security of their applications. This is the only way to integrate security seamlessly into their existing workflows. The perception of someone coming in and forcing tweaks to their code can be discouraging, but that isn’t to say security teams should be hands off. They need to take an advisory role, working with developers to ensure secure code. Training is key here. It’s likely developers will not be acquainted with the latest security strategies. Security experts need to educate developers on known vulnerabilities, threats and tools.

3. Identify a Security Champion on Every Development Team

It’s equally important to find someone on the development team who can go beyond automated testing tools to serve as the eyes and ears of the security team. Rather than assign the role to a member who already has additional responsibilities, choose someone who shows an interest in security. Because engineers may switch teams often, it’s best to have at least two security champions on each dev team. If one moves on, the institutional knowledge remains on the team and a new security champion can be trained up.

4. Automate Security Scans

Security cannot be an inhibitor to development. If it is, developers will fail to implement the proper security policies. With automated tools in place, development teams can efficiently test code throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC), ensuring more secure applications while delivering software on time.

5. Take a Data-Driven Approach to Tracking Progress

Showing progress is crucial, both for developers who want to see the impact security is having on their software and for the management team who needs clear insight into application security’s return on investment. Analytics with compelling visualizations supports this value by providing quick and intuitive data so organizations can assess their current state and take action to improve their risk posture. Sophisticated analytics allows organizations to target critical applications and fix critical findings by defining a custom security policy based on their specific risk tolerance.

— Chris Eng