What Is DevSecOps & How Does It Work?

DevSecOps means thinking about application and infrastructure security from the start. It also means automating some security gates to keep the DevOps workflow from slowing down.

Selecting the right tools to continuously integrate security, like agreeing on an integrated development environment (IDE) with security features, can help meet these goals. However, effective DevOps security requires more than new tools. It builds on the cultural changes of DevOps to integrate the work of security teams sooner rather than later.

At its core, it is a concept where app security is a shared responsibility across all of IT. The DevSecOps definition revolves around automatically making security a top priority as part of any software development lifecycle, with that continuing after development ends.

Understanding the concept of DevSecOps

DevSecOps stands for development plus security plus operations. It is an approach that combines application development, security, operations, and infrastructure as code (IaC) in an automated continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.

The process automates the integration of security at every phase of the software development lifecycle. This includes from initial design through integration, testing, deployment, and software delivery.

DevSecOps represents a natural and necessary evolution in the way development organizations approach security. In the past, security was ‘tacked on’ to software at the end of the development cycle (almost as an afterthought) by a separate security team and was tested by a separate quality assurance (QA) team.

This was manageable when software updates were released just once or twice a year. However, as software developers adopted Agile and DevOps practices, aiming to reduce software development cycles to weeks or even days, the traditional ‘tacked-on’ approach to security created an unacceptable bottleneck.

The main objective of DevSecOps is to automate, monitor and apply security at all phases of the software lifecycle: plan, develop, build, test, release, deliver, deploy, operate and monitor. Applying security at every stage of the software development process supports CI/CD, reduces the cost of compliance and enables faster software delivery.

DevSecOps means that every employee and team is responsible for security from the outset, and they must make decisions efficiently and put them into action without forfeiting security.

What does DevSecOps do?

DevSecOps integrates application and infrastructure security seamlessly into Agile and DevOps processes and tools. It addresses security issues as they emerge when they’re easier, faster, and less expensive to fix (and before they are put into production). Additionally, DevSecOps makes application and infrastructure security a shared responsibility of development, security, and IT operations teams, rather than the sole responsibility of a security silo.

It enables “software, safer, sooner”—the DevSecOps motto–by automating the delivery of secure software without slowing the software development cycle.

How DevSecOps works

A typical DevSecOps workflow is as follows:

Software is developed using a version control system.
A different team member analyzes the changes made to the application for security weaknesses, overall code quality and possible bugs.
The application is deployed within security configurations.
Automation is used to test the application’s back end, user interface, integrations and security.
If the application passes the tests, it is moved to the production environment.
In the production environment, various monitoring applications and security software monitor the application.

DevSecOps vs. DevOps

DevOps is a methodology under which developers and operations teams work together to create a more agile, streamlined software development and deployment framework. DevSecOps aims to automate key security tasks by embedding security controls and processes into the DevOps workflow. It extends the DevOps culture of shared responsibility to include security practices.

DevOps isn’t just about development and operations teams. If you want to take full advantage of the agility and responsiveness of a DevOps approach, IT security must also play an integrated role in the full life cycle of your apps.

DevSecOps means thinking about application and infrastructure security from the start. It also means automating some security gates to keep the DevOps workflow from slowing down. Selecting the right tools to continuously integrate security, like agreeing on an integrated development environment (IDE) with security features, can help meet these goals. However, effective DevOps security requires more than new tools—it builds on the cultural changes of DevOps to integrate the work of security teams sooner rather than later.

The DevOps and DevSecOps approaches are similar in some respects, including their use of automation and continuous processes to establish collaborative cycles of development. However, DevOps prioritizes speed of delivery, whereas DevSecOps emphasizes shifting security left or moving security to the earliest possible point in the development process.

Integrating Security into a DevOps framework

To integrate DevSecOps into the DevOps workflow, you have to systematically incorporate security design and checks and balances throughout the development process. In this way, DevSecOps also represents a significant cultural shift.

In a traditional application development structure, the DevOps team would rely on the security team to find vulnerabilities. They would then take the security team’s feedback and incorporate it into the next round of changes to the application. By combining forces with the security team early on, security becomes part of the original solution.

This gives developers a better chance of producing a secure application within the first few iterations.

The integration process involves the following:

Automation. Many security processes can be automated, preventing time-consuming, repetitive, manual entry.
Code analysis. The code developers write can be analyzed by security experts to identify potential vulnerabilities.
Regular threat assessments: As the application’s development progresses, the threats it is vulnerable to are bound to change. Regularly assessing potential threats enables the team to incorporate security at one stage before moving on to the next. This also prevents the team from going back and changing a foundational element of the application, which, in some cases, could necessitate altering subsequent facets of the program.
Configuration tracking. If the configuration of an element of an application or how the application interacts with others changes, it has to be known and tracked. This is because each configuration change could result in vulnerabilities.
Security training. While many developers have a basic understanding of security principles and techniques, more in-depth training is necessary. Knowledge of the inner workings of security threats and solutions will help them better integrate security into the development process.

DevSecOps tools

DevSecOps tools include the following:

Acunetix is a web security scanner intended to help developers find vulnerabilities as early in the development cycle as possible. Acunetix enables organizations to protect their web assets from hackers by providing specialized technologies that developers can use to detect and fix issues.

Aqua Platform from Aqua Security is an application security tool for containers and their infrastructures designed to prevent intrusions and vulnerabilities throughout the DevSecOps pipeline. It implements runtime security processes and controls and focuses on vulnerabilities related to network access and application images.

Aqua integrates with a variety of infrastructures, including Kubernetes, to secure clusters at the lowest network level. It also controls container activity in real-time using behavior profiles based on machine learning.

Checkmarx offers a static application security testing (SAST) tool that scans for security vulnerabilities in code. This tool helps developers deliver secure, reliable applications by incorporating code security analysis and testing into the development process. Checkmarx integrates with a variety of CI/CD tools and environments.

ThreatModeler is an automated threat modeling tool that can be deployed on-premises or in a cloud instance. It continuously monitors threat models for cloud computing environments, notifying users of updates and changes. It also provides a bidirectional API to integrate with CI/CD tools, enabling teams to build secure cloud infrastructures.

ThreatModeler offers reusable templates and built-in threat information and frameworks.

Benefits of DevSecOps

The two main benefits of DevSecOps are speed and security. Development teams deliver better, more-secure code faster, and, therefore, cheaper.

Improved, proactive security

DevSecOps introduces cybersecurity processes from the beginning of the development cycle. Throughout the development cycle, the code is reviewed, audited, scanned, and tested for security issues. These issues are addressed as soon as they are identified. Security problems are fixed before additional dependencies are introduced. Security issues become less expensive to fix when protective technology is identified and implemented early in the cycle.

Additionally, better collaboration between development, security, and operations teams improves an organization’s response to incidences and problems when they occur. DevSecOps practices reduce the time to patch vulnerabilities and free up security teams to focus on higher-value work.

These practices also ensure and simplify compliance, saving application development projects from having to be retrofitted for security.

Rapid, cost-effective software delivery

When software is developed in a non-DevSecOps environment, security problems can lead to huge time delays. Fixing the code and security issues can be time-consuming and expensive. The rapid, secure delivery of DevSecOps saves time and reduces costs by minimizing the need to repeat a process to address security issues after the fact.

This becomes more efficient and cost-effective since integrated security cuts out duplicative reviews and unnecessary rebuilds, resulting in more secure code.

Accelerated security vulnerability patching

A key benefit of DevSecOps is how quickly it manages newly identified security vulnerabilities. As DevSecOps integrates vulnerability scanning and patching into the release cycle, the ability to identify and patch common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVE) is diminished. This limits the window a threat actor has to take advantage of vulnerabilities in public-facing production systems.

A repeatable and adaptive process

As organizations mature, their security postures mature. DevSecOps lends itself to repeatable and adaptive processes. This ensures security is applied consistently across the environment, as the environment changes and adapts to new requirements.

A mature implementation of DevSecOps will have a solid automation, configuration management, orchestration, containers, immutable infrastructure, and even serverless compute environments.

Automation compatible with modern development

Cybersecurity testing can be integrated into an automated test suite for operations teams if an organization uses a continuous integration/continuous delivery pipeline to ship their software.

Automation of security checks depends strongly on the project and organizational goals. Automated testing can ensure incorporated software dependencies are at appropriate patch levels, and confirm that software passes security unit testing. Plus, it can test and secure code with static and dynamic analysis before the final update is promoted to production.

Challenges of DevSecOps

Some of the top challenges of implementing DevSecOps are as follows:

Teams are reluctant to integrate. The essence of DevSecOps is integrating teams so they can work together rather than independently. However, not everybody is ready to make the switch because they’re already accustomed to current development processes.
Battle of the tools. If development, operations and security teams have been working separately, they have likely been using different metrics and tools. Consequently, they might disagree on where to integrate tools, as it’s not easy to bring together tools from various departments and integrate them on one platform. The challenge is selecting the right tools and integrating them properly to build, deploy and test software in a continuous manner.
Implementing security in CI/CD pipelines. Generally, security has been thought of as something that comes at the end of the development cycle. However, with DevSecOps, security is part of CI/CD. For DevSecOps to succeed, teams can’t expect DevOps processes and tools to adapt to old methods of security.

By integrating security controls into DevOps workflows, organizations can realize the full potential of CI/CD. When companies deploy security or access control technologies from the beginning, they ensure that those controls are in line with a CI/CD flow.

DevSecOps best practices

DevSecOps should be the natural incorporation of security controls into your development, delivery, and operational processes.

Security education

Security is a combination of engineering and compliance. Organizations should form an alliance between the development engineers, operations teams, and compliance teams to ensure everyone in the organization understands the company’s security posture and follows the same standards.

Everyone involved with the delivery process should be familiar with the basic principles of application security, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) top 10, application security testing, and other security engineering practices. Developers need to understand thread models and compliance checks, and have a working knowledge of how to measure risks and exposure, and implement security controls

Shift left

‘Shift left’ is a DevSecOps mantra. It encourages software engineers to move security from the right (end) to the left (beginning) of the DevOps (delivery) process.

In a DevSecOps environment, security is an integral part of the development process from the beginning. An organization that uses DevSecOps brings in their cybersecurity architects and engineers as part of the development team. Their job is to ensure every component, and every configuration item in the stack is patched, configured securely, and documented.

Shifting left allows the DevSecOps team to identify security risks and exposures early and ensures that these security threats are addressed immediately. Not only is the development team thinking about building the product efficiently, but they are also implementing security as they build it.

Traceability, auditability, and visibility

Implementing traceability, auditability, and visibility in a DevSecOps process leads to deeper insight and a more secure environment:

Traceability allows you to track configuration items across the development cycle to where requirements are implemented in the code. This can play a crucial part in your organization’s control framework as it helps achieve compliance, reduce bugs, ensure secure code in application development, and help code maintainability.
Auditability is important for ensuring compliance with security controls. Technical, procedural, and administrative security controls need to be auditable, well-documented, and adhered to by all team members.
Visibility is a good management practice in general, but very important for a DevSecOps environment. This means the organization has a solid monitoring system in place to measure the heartbeat of the operation, send alerts, increase awareness of changes and cyberattacks as they occur, and provide accountability during the whole project lifecycle.

Culture: Communication, people, processes, and technology

Good leadership fosters a good culture that promotes change within the organization. It is important and essential in DevSecOps to communicate the responsibilities of security of processes and product ownership. Only then can developers and engineers become process owners and take responsibility for their work.

DevSecOps operations teams should create a system that works for them, using the technologies and protocols that fit their team and the current project. By allowing the team to create the workflow environment that fits their needs, they become invested stakeholders in the outcome of the project.