DevSecOps and Digital Transformation: Bridging the Security Gap

How DevSecOps Ensure Security in Development Lifecycle?

By Sudeep Srivastava, CEO, Appinventiv

The Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated digital transformation to a staggering speed. However, for most organizations going digital has also posed a considerable challenge at times. To ensure both longevity and success, organizations require a combination of the right people, the right tools, and the right skill sets.

Nevertheless, digital transformation brings new scopes like databases, digital assets, cloud computing services, applications, and websites, thereby increasing the need to secure the organization. Therefore, it is vital to deploy a complete security approach in the form of DevSecOps to avoid security breaches, protect the company’s goodwill, and maintain the customer’s connection.

As per Statista, 47% of companies are now leveraging the DevOps or DevSecOps methodology for the software development process. This practice aims for timely delivery while ensuring high software quality and shortened development cycle period. Reasons, why businesses are choosing the DevOps or DevSecOps methodology for software development are faster time to market, code qualities, security, and improved collaboration among the developers.

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps is an excellent solution for organizations that requires the immediate adoption of security and improvise their productivity level. DevSecOps is positioned as one of the top security controls in the development process, and it operates at every level of the product development life cycle stage. If implemented properly, DevSecOps can train employees, automate security checks and ensure the development of a great product.

DevSecOps is the seamless integration of security protection and testing, right from software development to the deployment stage. The goal is to incorporate security into the CI/CD workflow in both pre and post-production environments.

Is DevOps Different From DevSecOps?

For accelerating the development and delivery of the software product, the modern software development process utilizes an agile SDLC process. DevOps and DevSecOps utilize the agile framework for various purposes. DevOps mainly focuses on the speed of the application delivery, whereas DevSecOps too focuses on speed but ensures the complete security of the deployed application. The goal of DevSecOps is to promote a faster development process with a secured code base.

DevSecOps is all about integrating security at every level of the software development life cycle stage. In DevSecOps, security is the stakeholder’s shared responsibility in the DevOps value chain. In short, DevOps focuses on speed, while DevSecOps maintains velocity without compromising security.

How Does DevSecOps Work?

By integrating automated security checks into the software development pipeline, organizations can verify the security of both their application infrastructure and the application itself before it is tested with real users. These types of security checks can come in the form of container scanning, code analysis, infrastructure configuration validation, and peer reviews.

Developers can directly identify the problems that were previously established in the CI/CD workflow and fix them rather than waiting for security audits to process after all the work has been done. This helps in embedding security hygiene into the company’s digital culture, thereby increasing the security level while reducing the scope of failure. Various software development companies are now offering DevOps services, taking care of their client’s end-to-end DevOps needs to ensure the deployment of a robust product.

How DevSecOps Helps in Bridging the Security Gaps

Adopting DevSecOps into your software development lifecycle unifies the development process security and the entire operations. Let's have a look at how DevSecOps has benefited organizations along with bridging the security gaps.

Faster Product Delivery

Security issues often bog down the developers with the time-consuming bug-fixing processes. By adopting DevSecOps, things become easier as the developers can now resolve the bugs and glitches easily. DevSecOps, thus, eliminates or minimizes such bottlenecks and streamlines the security of a particular product development process.

Increased Vulnerability Patching and Code Coverage

By utilizing automated processes, DevSecOps improvises overall security through wider and increased code coverage and vulnerability patching. In doing so, it analyzes and resolves security vulnerabilities more quickly.

Proactive and Improvised Security

DevSecOps inculcate the best cybersecurity practice throughout the software development lifecycle and delivery stage. By channelizing audits, code reviews, QA tests, and scanning for security vulnerabilities, problems are detected and addressed in a lean process. With DevSecOps, fixing bugs has become easier and more cost-effective.

Builds an Adaptive Security Process

DevSecOps encourages a kind of work culture where security is constantly applied throughout the product development life cycle environment. DevSecOps, as a process is capable of transforming and adapting to new requirements.

Advantages of Adopting the DevSecOps

With modern technologies like dynamic apps, flexible cloud computing, shared storage, data analytics, and containerization, businesses have seen huge changes in their IT integrity in the last few years. DevSecOps has the capability of elevating your mission-critical application’s speed, performance, and functionality, scaling it to new heights of success.

However, due to the lack of solid security and compliance, these applications are lately deployed. This is where DevSecOps comes to the scene. DevSecOps ensures that all the security measures are in place and no malware gets injected into the application during the development process. Here a some of the following advantages of adopting DevSecOps in your digital transformation projects.

• Continuous security checks and monitoring
• Reduced compliance cost
• Quicker deployment of applications
• Enhanced project transparency from the start to the end
• Faster recovery time in the event of an unwanted security breach
• Automated security throughout

Wrapping it Up

The purpose of every business in the era of digital transformation is to offer the best products to their customers that are free of security threats and hacks. DevSecOps is a technique that is cost-effective and proactive. The adoption of DevSecOps helps developers to employ the best security precautions in an established atmosphere where security begins right at the outset of development.

Integrating DevOps and security into the software development life cycle doesn’t just make the product more secure but also provides it a competitive advantage. Partner with the best DevSecOps service provider today, who can optimize your development processes efficiently and help you achieve the best business outcomes.

About the Author

Sudeep Srivastava is the CEO of mobile app development company “Appinventiv”, is someone who has established himself as the perfect blend of optimism and calculated risks, a trait that has embossed itself in every work process of Appinventiv. Having built a brand that is known to tap the unexplored ideas in the mobile industry, he spends his time exploring ways to take Appinventiv to the point where technology blends with lives.

Sudeep can be reached online at https://twitter.com/sudeepsriv?s=20 and at our company website https://appinventiv.com/