Best DevOps Security Practices: DevSecOps and its Advantages

DevOps methodology is more relevant today, given the high demand for faster and scalable development. Companies can easily integrate scalable development, security, and operational philosophies into their DevOps strategy with DevSecOps. 

This article is for you if you need to become more familiar with DevSecOps. 

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps is a branch of DevOps that adds a security attribute to the conventional DevOps approach. It is a way to provide security to applications and infrastructures based on the DevOps methodology. Software engineers can utilize DevSecOps to ensure that applications are less vulnerable to security threats and more adaptable for users’ uses. You can highly automate DevOps security with DevSecOps by including security checks from the beginning of the application’s pipelines.

For the successful adoption of DevSecOps, more than selecting the right tools for Continuous Integration, the security teams must be aware of best practices to meet the required security.

1.Implement a DevOps security model

The first step towards successful DevSecOps implementation is to select the suitable security model to secure all operations. The DevSecOps model you will pick will include all the features that will ensure security throughout the development lifecycle, including identity and access management (IAM), configuration, code review, vulnerability management, governance, and other cybersecurity functions. This is how DevOps engineers can also improve the quality of product releases, reducing the probability of recalls and fixes that can prove costly after a product release.

2. Execute vulnerability management

System vulnerability in DevOps can raise problems with the overall development lifecycle. This is why including constant scanning and monitoring in DevSecOps will ensure that the systems adhere to the security requirements underlined by DevOps engineers throughout the development and integration levels. 

Penetration testing and other vulnerability assessments are part of the DevOps security that help developers understand the potential security risks within the code. This puts them in a better position to rectify the issues before releasing the product.

Vulnerability management must be implemented from the beginning of the project management to ensure that there are no hidden security risks in the code that pose a threat later on. 

3.Automate the DevOps security

DevOps’ methodology makes the development and deployment of projects incredibly fast, but the increased speed of deployment also gives rise to security challenges within the DevOps teams. 

The security teams can only keep up with the accelerated development pace if they manually process the security tasks. This is why automation of the DevOps security processes is a must for effective DevSecOps. 

One way DevOps engineers can introduce automation in DevOps security is to automate the security processing tasks, such as privilege management and vulnerability testing, which will help cut the time spent on ensuring product integrity and security. It also saves resources as human errors are significantly reduced. The time saved can be better invested in advanced security testing during the later stages of product development. 

4.Apply network segmentation

A security measure that can be taken is to proactively target the attackers by throwing them off the track through network segmentation. In DevSecOps, the network segmentation strategy employs a technique for dividing and conquering the attackers to leave them vulnerable. This approach’s primary step is ensuring that access to the application server resources is only limited to a few engineers and developers. This is important to minimize the security vulnerabilities that arise from the continuous workflow. 

The next step is to divide the application server network into several segments so that attackers cannot access all the data in one go. In DevSecOps, network segmentation is a proven way to limit the threats from attackers. Furthermore, it also helps keep errors in the development environment to a minimum. 

5.Minimized administrative privileges

As mentioned before, minimal workflow and resource access is an efficient way to reduce security vulnerabilities; you can also minimize administrative privileges to application resources. With this step, you can have better control over the amount of data that a single party can control. An additional step that can be taken is to store critical data on the local machines to control their access. Also, temporary users must never be allotted privileges at any point within the project’s development cycle to reduce authorization overhead.

Conclusion 

DevOps security is an integral part of the methodology that ensures product development and deployment have embedded security best practices throughout its lifecycle. DevOps has become a significant product development and deployment philosophy apt for current agile development needs. As a DevOps engineer, you must know the DevSecOps best practices we have listed here to fully utilize your team’s talent, resources, and capabilities.

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