Is DevSecOps the same as SecDevOps? Does it matter?

DevOps Rules Web Application Development

Larger companies are now software companies that build and run their own websites and applications. This means that the same company (and often the same people) are working at every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and development to operations and maintenance. In such an environment, merging all the individual steps into a single, integrated workflow can significantly increase efficiency and agility while reducing costs.

Agile methodology with continuous integration and continuous delivery (or continuous delivery) In everyday web application development, DevOps is the only practical way to keep business-critical applications running smoothly on frequent updates. The entire development process is largely automated to minimize manual steps and communication overhead, and the company can deploy a variety of tools across multiple toolchains (average of 10 toolchains; 2020 Atlassian DevOps Trends Survey). Automation allows small development teams to deliver projects on a scale and schedule that could not be reached by more manual methods.

The benefits of agile DevOps are well documented. Develop faster, reduce costs, reduce revision time, and respond quickly to changing business requirements. However, there is one important aspect of application development that is missing from many DevOps workflows. That’s application security. Perhaps because of the pre-web misconception that software security is not a big deal, many organizations still want to treat this as a post-consideration and link security test silos to agile, highly automated DevOps processes. As we wrote before, this cannot work and only serves to reinforce the myth that cybersecurity and automation don’t mix.

5 reasons to build security into your DevOps workflow

Because CI/CD pipelines can deliver weekly or daily application updates, you need to automate application security testing to keep up with agile development and operations. But surprisingly, many organizations still treat software security as a good thing to have, not a necessity, so let’s quickly look at 5 reasons why you should include application security testing in your DevOps practices.

• Reduce the risk of data breaches: Web applications are a major vector of cyberattacks, so following security best practices from the early stages of development is critical to reducing security risks. This is especially true given the far-reaching consequences of a data breach.
• Fix security flaws faster: No matter which AppSec tools and processes you use, you may discover security issues that need fixing. An efficient workflow can make the difference between quickly implementing routine bug fixes and stopping the entire pipeline.
• Security automation to keep up with DevOps: Automated toolchains are at the heart of DevOps, so having a separate security team to do security testing is an inevitable bottleneck in your development pipeline.
• Keep pace with software innovation: Efforts to quickly bring business-critical capabilities into production do not mean that security software cannot be delivered. But only if security is an essential and predictable part of the process.
• Do more with your existing resources: A software development organization may have hundreds of developers but only a handful of security experts, so starting security testing early in the development cycle helps to minimize security risks.

The bottom line is that DevOps organizations can’t afford it. ~ no The only realistic way to conduct application security testing and build security products in an agile environment is through security integration and automation.

Different approaches to building secure DevOps

Time to answer the headline questions. Does it really matter where you add Sec to DevOps, or is it more of a marketing alphabet soup? The answer really depends on how deep you want to go. When talking about building secure software quickly and efficiently, the exact term doesn’t matter as long as everyone knows that security practices should be an integral part of the development and operations pipeline. DevSecOps is the most popular way to describe this, but placing the security part elsewhere can be useful for highlighting steps in other workflows. Let’s decipher everything.

• DevSecOps: This industry standard term links security in the middle of the DevOps pipeline and suggests that while the whole process is still primarily about development (since Dev comes first), software must be secure before it is delivered to the operations team. Given that most existing DevOps organizations don’t focus on security, the DevSecOps approach is the most practical way to incorporate security testing into your software development process.
• SecDevOps (Also known as Rugged DevOps): Literally, this security-first approach requires DevOps teams to consider security considerations in all their decisions, from secure design choices and secure coding practices to hardened deployments. While this is clearly the way of the future from a security standpoint, SecDevOps requires a security-first mindset (with appropriate skills and training) across all teams and processes that may take time to build.
• DevOpsSec: Perhaps the least popular of the three terms, this combination suggests that security is anchored in traditional DevOps processes, for example by performing security testing only after the application is deployed. Better than nothing, these late-stage testing negates many of the benefits of DevOps, stopping and backtracking the agile pipeline whenever a vulnerability is discovered.

DevOps itself isn’t a hard and fast model, it’s a very general concept. Depending on your organization, adding security to DevOps can be as simple as connecting the right automation tools to your development and deployment process, or as complex as bringing together separate teams to grow a security-infused DevOps culture from scratch. . Fortunately, there is an easy way to build AppSec into an agile development process.

Automated development requires automated AppSec.

Application security testing covers a variety of methods, including manual penetration testing, static code analysis (SAST), vulnerability scanning, and software configuration analysis. Each has its own strengths, and mature application security programs should incorporate multiple approaches to maximize testing coverage. In ~ Invic T, we firmly believe that the foundation of this program should be an accurate, integrated and automated solution for dynamic application security testing (DAST, also known as dynamic analysis) that is easy to deploy independent of existing workflows and underlying technologies.

Modern DAST products like Netsparker provide visibility into the actual security of applications in their current environment, whether in development, staging, or production (or a combination of these). The most important thing in a DevSecOps deployment is the ability to integrate tests into existing deployment processes, trigger tests, and report results fully automatically. Learn how to do this by reading our white paper on Building Dynamic Security Tests on SDLC. A number of built-in integrations make Netsparker ready to work with popular issue trackers and CI/CD platforms.

The vulnerability testing process itself is also automated, as Netsparker has evidence-based scanning that automatically identifies over 94% of directly impacting security vulnerabilities. Without the risk of false positives, you can set up the issue tracker integration to send these validated and actionable reports (with remediation instructions) directly to developers for remediation. With this security test automation, security issues are resolved just like any other software bug without leaving the optimized tools and workflows that DevOps professionals depend on.