Over the past decade, the world of cybersecurity and development as a whole has continued to follow the shift-left pathway. Shift-left describes the movement of product testing and security probing toward the earlier stages of development, allowing developers to have a larger hand in securing their applications.
Application security is paramount in the software development lifecycle. After all, the success of a rapid release would be completely undermined by any breach, compromise, or vulnerability that developers failed to catch. To deliver the most secure application possible, developers are continuing to integrate security and testing into the heart of the software development lifecycle.
In this article, we’ll explore the value of DevSecOps, touch on the benefits of building security into the SDLC, and demonstrate how your business can build more secure application development pipelines.
The Value of DevSecOps
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DevSecOps is another layer of the DevOps strategy, aiming to instill additional systems to ensure a final application launch has a high degree of security. DevSecOps environments understand that a secure application is critical for the overall success of an application and will then prioritize this in the software development life cycle.
Instead of one final security check or building security protocols into applications as a last-minute addition, DevSecOps places security practices throughout the entire development lifecycle. Even in the initial planning stages, security will always be a major talking point in every conversation, right through to the development, testing, and even deployment strategies.
There are several reasons why DevSecOps is a preferred development practice:
- Improved Vulnerability Mitigation: When you integrate secure coding and development into the core of your application development lifecycle, you ensure that any vulnerability is found as quickly as possible. This strategy ensures there are no further developments that utilize a system or component with a vulnerability. Regular checking will help streamline future security endeavors.
- Streamlined Development: When your developers are adjusted to DevSecOps, secure practices will become second nature. Over time, this will help to speed up development, as you won’t run into any unexpected delays with last-minute security checks that encounter large vulnerabilities.
- Enhanced Monitoring: With every developer keeping an eye on the security posture of your application, you are much more likely to spot and nullify any vulnerabilities there may be in your code. DevSecOps helps to radically increase the baseline level of security in an application.
In alignment with the very best parts of DevOps, DevSecOps takes this methodology and infuses it with a much-needed focus on secure coding, active monitoring, and vulnerability prevention.
Building Security into the SDLC
The first step in building an effective DevSecOps approach is to identify what current security solutions your applications have and where you intend to expand upon them. The exact security requirements that an application has will vary greatly depending on the function, scope, and access that it has. With that in mind, take time to identify your exact requirements, even discussing them with your developers to pinpoint where new security measures will be most effective.
According to recent Statista research, the most common challenge when businesses attempt to implement DevSecOps is a lack of security training for developers, with 33.9% of organizations experiencing this issue. As to not run into this issue, your organization should offer security training that assesses a developer’s ability to follow secure code practices and execute a range of basic security assessments.
After ensuring your developers are well-equipped to move into a DevSecOps cycle, you should then conduct threat modeling at each stage of the lifecycle. Identifying what potential threats could impose themselves on your application will help developers understand what sort of security features they should be looking for at any given moment.
As security threats can shift over time, it’s important that your business familiarize itself with the most recent threats that governing bodies like the MITRE ATT&CK Framework have identified. These lists of threats will provide direct insight into the most popular attack vectors and guide your developers toward implementing application protection.
Where possible, also look for opportunities to implement automated security checks and solutions. When using other security tools, you decrease the workload for your developers while leveraging 24/7 system monitoring to keep your application safe. This advice similarly works for threat modeling, with the majority of modeling and response pathways being easy to automate.
Regularly check back in with your developers, as they will have direct visibility into your application and the development lifecycle and will be able to recommend future adaptations and changes.
Ensuring AppSec Throughout the Application Lifecycle
Alongside effective DevSecOps practices, businesses should invest in an effective range of cybersecurity solutions to accompany their developers. When shifting left, a habit that some companies fall into is putting yet another task on their developers without any support. Instead of leaving the security of an application completely up to your developers, you can employ security solutions to streamline the process and reduce the magnitude of the task.
Modern-day security solutions like WAF, WAAP, and RASP can all offer a high degree of protection from common threats across different parts of an application. WAFs, for example, will guard your application and monitor incoming traffic. RASP tools, on the other hand, will sit inside your application and identify any suspicious behavior.
To fully integrate DevSecOps into your business, you should look for supportive security tools where possible, making use of the fantastic solutions on the market to supplement the hard work of your developer teams.