Improving Security with Mapping, Automation and DevOps

Strong cybersecurity is paramount for every organization. But all too often, security teams are disconnected from ongoing development processes and viewed either as an impediment to bringing products to market or as an afterthought. This leads to increased costs and possible gaps in the attack surfaces of new platforms.

While many organizations are turning to security automation to help them manage and mitigate their expanding threat landscape, quick fixes rarely work. Planning is required to help organizations determine their pain points, add security early in the software development process, and determine where automation can deliver the best ROI.

What Should Be Automated?

Security automation can programmatically test, institute guardrails, provide feedback and remediate cyberthreats by executing tasks as part of the continuous improvement pipeline. This, in turn, can help understaffed security teams by streamlining complicated and time-consuming testing processes, enabling teams to maximize their time, be more productive and focus on risk priorities. Once the manual process is removed, the automated workflows can then carry out a variety of more minute actions using intelligence and logical decision-making.

Security-focused areas that may benefit from automation technology include but are not limited to:

• Static and dynamic code analysis used to discover security vulnerabilities
• Test harnesses for software configured to run a program unit under varying conditions to discover and monitor its behavior and outputs
• Upstream code analysis that examines code such as complete code blocks or patches
• Vulnerability testing, management and remediation to discover and fix weaknesses that may be susceptible to attacks
• Penetration testing used to simulate cyberattacks on an organization’s computer systems and evaluate security posture
• Automated enforcement based on data classification and tagging strategy
• Deployment and management of infrastructure components

Focus on ROI

Despite the benefits, many organizations face substantial hurdles in developing, implementing, testing and optimizing the comprehensive, integrative, long-term approach needed to use security automation to cope with the evolving threat landscape. It’s all too common for organizations to begin projects that start with automation as the outcome rather than rigorously mapping the processes and determining where value from automation can be gained.

Consider an organization that decides to automate the process of deploying a firewall to an AWS cloud. A team spends several weeks developing and testing an automation playbook that can spin up virtual firewalls, license them, connect them to a central manager, deploy configurations and apply them and send logs to the appropriate places. Testing proves the automation works.

But when asked how many firewalls they expect to spin up this year, the answer is two–maybe. How many next year? None. The team, therefore, spent more time automating this function than it would have taken to just deploy the systems and the organization won’t likely realize any direct return on this work for at least two years.

Value Stream Mapping

The first step in achieving real value is to understand that automation is a second-order operation that relies on a thorough assessment and plan of all the steps required to achieve real technical and business outcomes. That means conducting value stream mapping to analyze, design and manage workflows that best suit your environment.

Mapping will help you analyze and define security processes. Without analyzing your processes, you’ll have no idea of where the bottlenecks are or how they can be removed. Better understanding the processes will also allow you to refine them as needed. Without doing all this, you’ll have no way to prove the value of the automation you’re implementing, and no compelling business justification for it.

The Role of DevOps

Few organizations are able to effectively realize the benefits of automation right out of the gate. Value stream mapping enables organizations to determine their pain points, pinpoint exactly where they want to use automation and identify processes that cannot or should not be automated. Clear-eyed planning and assessment will help teams define a process and determine the value of return on automating certain processes.

In addition, for security to be effective, we have to shift security left in the software development life cycle (SDLC). Security practitioners should be engaged in the development pipeline, including collaborating on automation initiatives and building harness and test cases as the work progresses. This will save time, improve quality and ultimately add value, ensuring the success of security automation projects.