The international potential loss due to the surge in cybercrime reached the staggering over $6 trillion in 2021. Unfortunately, with almost 770 vulnerabilities being uncovered in just the first six months, the world noted an unprecedented rise in the number of zero-day attacks.
It is safe to say that in the world we live today, cybersecurity is an important element that any business needs to have. In an era where many businesses are targeting the world of online presence, the need to incorporate security at all levels of the product engineering process has become rather paramount. While the DevOps market is booming – accelerating in growth towards a total value of $57.90 billion by 2030, one element seems to be lacking- Security.
That is where technology such as DevSecOps comes into play, which is a paradigm which encompasses all the security needed in the development cycle of a product, thereby providing solid security without compromising on speed or agility. It’s a win win situation for both where DevSecOps is an aspect of cybersecurity and vice versa. A research that focused on over 250 enterprises with more than $1 billion in revenue found that around 75% of those have initiated the use of DevSecOps in ongoing application development.
This article will present the critical elements of DevSecOps, which are security testing automation, compliance automation, vulnerability scanning, and also metrics and monitoring for security, and how crucial they are in today’s engineering product pipelines.
A Swift, Fearless, Secure: Automating Security Testing
A central part of DevSecOps is security testing automation and bringing a shift left approach. There is a higher tendency for errors to occur if security testing is done manually, and it is also very time-consuming, the result is that threats are able to continue bringing problems, automation makes it possible to integrate security tasks as part of a continuous development process, exactly when the issues arise. In these kinds of modern environments where working on software in cycles and iterations is very important tools for debugging like test security automation come for the rescue to pinpoint weaknesses effectively in early stages of production. Once again addressing cost mitigation this can be done by automating SAST and dynamic application security testing (DAST).
As per a recent study, up to 25% users have verified that they have complete test automation, and this statistic has increased by 13% since 2021. Another study discovered that eleven hundred percent of those polled said they thought their company could benefit from automatic compliance and security processes.
No Compromise on Compliance: Making Life Easier With Automation
Industries like finance, legal, or healthcare, for example, require adherence to certain laws like GDPR, HIPAA or PCI-DSS so therefore compliance is key. Compliance automations work by consecutively ensuring that privacy and security requirements are highly enforced without human intervention. In the DevSecOps world, compliance automation crosses the large chasm between traditionally painstaking and largely manual compliance processes to ever improving automated processes embedded in product engineering pipelines. The flip side to manual compliance checks is quite a circumspect one since this often leads to deadlines being missed or other oversights but automation balances this by enforcing consistent risky events and predictable processes required to meet regulations. By incorporating compliance check within CI/CD workflows, teams ensure that processes adhered to organizational policies, complied with regulatory requirements, and met industry standards through all development phases.
Chef InSpec or HashiCorp Sentinel go a long way in establishing that compliance shouldn’t be a periodic thing. Rather compliance should be on an ongoing continuous basis and ensure real time audit logs with instant feedback in the case a deviation is observed.
As a result, the chances of non-compliance are minimized, the time-to-market is reduced, and the bottlenecks due to manual reviews are removed. Compliance automation allows for architecture reviews to be proactively automated which ensures that product engineering teams can commercialize products very quickly while staying compliant with any applicable rules and regulations.
Security at All Times: Smooth Vulnerability Scanning
One unpatched vulnerability which could be found in any given application could risk compromising the entire application which requires that there be interruption free scanning to resolve such vulnerabilities even before deployment happens. Vulnerability scanning is more or less a watchman over the engineering pipelines of a product. It is incorporated into CI/CD processes where coding is done to identify vulnerabilities, flaws, holes and bugs in the code, dependencies and configurations prior to the deployment of the program in the market. By performing these scans on pre-configured commit checks, build phases or pre-made container images, developers are more responsive to threats. In this way, security defects can be detected by the teams during the release of the new version and the necessary fixes will be applied immediately without delaying the cycle. At the heart of it, it is about the proper balance between the speed of deployment and security, which satisfies developers, security teams, and stakeholders without any barriers to innovation.
Speaking of the standout tools for DevSecOps, Snyk is a hero for developers since it concentrates on container security and open-source vulnerabilities. Alternatively, OWASP Dependency-Check goes one step further by analyzing the project’s dependencies to find known common vulnerabilities and exposures. Next, Nessus is a go to for entire network and other infrastructure scans while Trivy excels in container and Kubernetes ecosystem due to its simple design. And lastly, Burp Suite is a pro at handling web application security. It’s clear that each tool has it’s own strength, thus the best choice will be in accordance with the pipeline requirements and areas of focus.
Monitor, Measure, Protect: Security Metrics and Monitoring
Saying this out loud will sound pointless, but one cannot disregard the important role measuring and monitoring security performance plays in the long-term goals of the organization. In the world of DevSecOps, security performance measurement and monitoring is like a physician checking a pulse of the surgical or product engineering pipeline. They provide accurate information about how secure code, infrastructure, and even processes are at the moment of time.
Metrics create a sense of responsibility and responsibility and assist many entities in measuring the trajectory of their security stance over the time. A number of metrics i.e. the number of vulnerabilities, time to resolve, and security debt, assist teams in adhering to risks and informing interested parties. This works also towards enabling improvement efforts on a more datacentric manner.
DevSecOps is an approach in itself that requires expertise and skills, and according to the recent outlook, its growth has only skyrocketed in 2023. It now has become a necessity for every organization and if done correctly, DevSecOps can provide organizations with a plethora of opportunities. As far as the tools go that enable seamless integration with DevSecOps, tools like Splunk and Datadog make monitoring a breeze for developers.
Having said that, Stride Digital Partners goes above and beyond in this regard as they enhance businesses with secure infrastructure ensuring faster time to market. Not only does it secure the infrastructure, but it also continuously monitors the infrastructure that helps with identifying potential bottlenecks and optimizing performance, in return enhancing the operational resilience while ensuring that compliance is never at stake. On top of it, They integrate automation for continuous integration, delivering an efficient and better risk-aware pipeline that retains the security requirements while exceeding customer expectations. Overall, Stride Digital Partners ensures cutting edge business engineering practices within an organization while ensuring security tweaks are there to protect the product and the organization.
Conclusion
A Gartner 2020 Study claims that the DevSecOps approach is on the verge of becoming mainstream. In support of that, another Gartner study done in 2022 states that out of all respondents, 36% of them have stated that their organization develops software using DevSecOps, and the percentage rose from 27% in 2020.
The global DevSecOps market size is slated to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.1% from 2021 to 2028 with North America emerging as the leader with the largest revenue share in 2020. With this technology enabling teams to deliver secure, compliant, and high-performing software, DevSecOps is bridging the gap between speed and security and building the foundation of trust for a smarter, more reliable future.
