How to Create a DevSecOps Culture

According to Globe Newswire, the global DevOps market value is estimated to reach $17 billion by 2026. It’s not a surprising finding; more and more organizations are turning to DevOps to drive their digital transformations. Software ultimately powers the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, mobile applications, and other technology innovations that organizations are now using to deliver digital services to their customers, noted DevOps Digest. With DevOps, organizations can deliver better-quality digital services to their customers more quickly.

Those organizations must grapple with a number of security challenges in the process, however. In its whitepaper “The Ultimate Guide of Orchestrating Security and DevOps,” Ampcus Cyber pointed out the fact that most security obstacles involving DevOps result from the “cultural conflict” between developers and security professionals. The latter is ensuring security no matter how long it takes, whereas the former is interested in releasing new software products as quickly as possible. Anything that potentially slows down that software development lifecycle tends to engender cultural resistance among developers—even if retroactive bug fixes end up taking more time and effort than staged code reviews.

The types of tools that developers are using also complicates an organization’s security. Developers frequently use containers, cloud services, and open-source tools to perform their work. These utilities facilitate flexibility and scalability, but they also introduce additional digital risk due to a lack of visibility over these disparate resources. In the process, they could end up causing security issues that merit extensive fixes following an application’s release.

Meeting These Challenges with DevSecOps

Organizations can tackle the security challenges discussed above by embracing DevSecOps. This decision requires that organizations take their DevOps transition one step further by uniting developers, operations, and security together into a collaborative cross-team paradigm. In the process, organizations must keep in mind the four pillars of DevSecOps culture identified by Snyk. These are as follows:

• People – The idea here is to change the mindset of developers, operations teams, and security professionals so that they all get out of their silos and realize a common goal: developing and quickly releasing new software that’s both stable and secure.

• Process – DevSecOps rejects the “gating model” where security and operations are allowed to occur only at certain times within the software development lifecycle. Instead, it promotes mutual accountability in the form of new processes that incorporate security and operations best practices throughout the course of development.

• Technology – It’s imperative that organizations have the right technology to help them adopt a DevSecOps culture. Towards this end, organizations can look to strategically automate some parts of their environment and eliminate other parts that aren’t working.

• Governance – Embracing a culture like DevSecOps is a long-term investment. Organizations need to be able to track that investment over time to make sure their people, processes, and technologies are working together. They can do this with the help of a comprehensive metrics program.

With the right people, process, technology, and governance measures in place, organizations can reap the benefits of DevSecOps. These include eliminating silos between development, security, and operations in the name of fostering collaboration, detecting vulnerabilities early on, improving operations, and speeding up delivery times. Together, these factors ultimately help to save organizations time, money, and resources.

How to Build a DevSecOps Culture

When it comes time to actually begin building a DevSecOps culture, organizations can follow the advice of GitHub by beginning with a developer-first approach. The idea here is not to hold up developers with security processes that take them out of their workflow. It’s to integrate security measures that work with developers in their workflow, thereby enabling security teams to identify bugs and resolve them as new software is being built.

Those security measures need to be tuned to find meaningful security issues, not false positives. Using automated security tools can help to identify and fix those weaknesses on a timely basis. So too can encouraging day-to-day collaboration between developers and security. This type of communication can lead to process changes like the incorporation of security checks into code reviews and/or the creation of entirely new security-driven workflows. It can also help to eliminate bad behavior such as by motivating the security and development teams to embrace technologies that they can trust.

Cultural Change with the Right Expertise

All of the above is a lot to do for organizations on their own. Fortunately, organizations don’t have to go it alone. They can work with Ampcus Cyber and its end-to-end DevSecOps Consulting Services and Solutions. The managed security services provider begins by assessing the strength of organizations’ existing DevOps and security maturity levels and tools. Next, it creates solution frameworks before formulating and executing a tailored plan through which it implements and supports new DevSecOps initiatives that incorporate security into build automation, environment management and other areas of the business, all while adopting supportive processes, technologies, training and governance measures.

DevSecOps is a cultural change that can revolutionize the way in which organizations deliver digital services to their customers. They just need the right expertise guiding them along way to optimize this shift.