How to Get Security Groups to Join Your DevSecOps Journey
DevSecOps, a movement that relies on collaboration among all aspects of the software development lifecycle to more rapidly deliver features and fixes to meet business objectives, is making waves across the software development community. Organizations are using this initiative to shift security left and assure that software meets functional requirements while not opening up end-users to breaches of privacy or exploitation through vulnerabilities.
Often the move to adopt DevSecOps is driven directly from the application development group, to help bring security earlier in the lifecycle and prevent them from being a late-stage roadblock to getting features and fixes to production. However, convincing a security group to get on board with your DevSecOps journey may not be an easy task.
These four points can help you prove to your security group that DevSecOps is in everyone’s best interest.
DevSecOps Is a Security Enabler
Security groups are often afraid that changing anything is going to cost them time and not allow them to properly assess applications in a reasonable schedule. But by leveraging automation to identify issues sooner, development teams can fix issues earlier in the lifecycle.
Your security group can then focus their time and resources on more complex security tasks, such as threat modeling and penetration testing, instead of monotonous manual security scans.
DevSecOps Gives Greater Context
One of the biggest challenges security groups face is actually understanding what development teams are building, how users will interact with it, and the real security profile of the application.
By collaborating more often with the team, your security group will gain a better understanding of what the system is and how individuals might exploit it. This will allow them to build more confidence in the risk profile and make more informed recommendations that the development team can act on.
DevSecOps Reduces Exposure Time
Many organizations have adopted myopically focused policies that incentivize keeping the number of vulnerabilities low on their applications, but fail to address vulnerabilities that may have been left unattended for long periods of time. Security groups often delay releases until new vulnerabilities are addressed, but this leaves existing production bugs exposed for even longer, giving hackers ample time to exploit the weakness in production.
DevSecOps allows us to address fixes and exploits in more frequent interactions that shift the focus from the sheer number of vulnerabilities to how long we have been left exposed.
DevSecOps Provides Better Governance
In a traditional waterfall model, most security groups work with the application development team to outline what the application will look like and don’t return until it’s ready to be released. Then they are surprised when processes, architectures, or features have changed.
DevSecOps pushes for treating everything as code. This includes infrastructure, test, and even your pipeline. By treating everything as code, everything is instantaneously reproducible, which makes it easier to audit and reduces questions about what happened when.
