DevSecOps best practices

DevSecOps best practices

DevSecOps needs to naturally integrate security controls into the development, deployment, and operational processes. Kindly find below mentioned are the DevSecOps best practices.

  • Shift Left Approach
  • Security education
  • Culture
  • Traceability, auditability, visibility

Let us deep dive in detail now.

Shift Left Approach

  • "Shift Left" is the DevSecOps mantra. This encourages software developers to shift security from right to left in the DevOps process.
  • In the DevSecOps environment, security is an integral part of the development process from the beginning.
  • Organizations using DevSecOps invite cyber security architects and engineers as part of their development team.
  • Your job is to ensure that all components and configuration items in the stack are patched, securely configured, and documented.
  • Shifting to the left allows the DevSecOps team to identify security risks and vulnerabilities early and respond immediately to these security threats.
  • The development team not only thinks about developing the product efficiently, but also implements security during development.

Security education

  • Security is a combination of engineering and compliance.
  • Organizations need to form partnerships between development engineers, operations teams, and compliance teams to ensure that everyone in the organization understands the organization's security structure and follows the same standards.
  • Anyone involved in the deployment process should be familiar with the basic principles of application security, the Top 10 Open Web Application Security Projects (OWASP), application security testing, and other security engineering practices.
  • Developers need to understand threading models, compliance checks, and have a working knowledge of risks and how risks are measured and security controls are implemented.

Culture

Communication, People, Processes and technologies

  • Good leadership fosters a good culture that drives change within an organization.
  • At DevSecOps, it is important and essential to communicate responsibility for process security and product ownership.
  • Only then can developers and engineers become process owners and take ownership for their work.
  • The DevSecOps operations team needs to build a system that works for them, using technologies and protocols that are appropriate for the team and the project at hand.
  • By allowing the team to create a work environment that suits their needs, the team becomes a stakeholder interested in the outcome of the project.

Traceability, auditability, visibility

Implementing traceability, auditability, and visibility into your DevSecOps process leads to deeper insights and a safer environment.

Traceability allows you to track configuration items throughout the development cycle to where the requirements are implemented in your code.

It can play an important role in your organization's control framework as it helps you achieve compliance, reduce errors, ensure secure code in application development, and support code maintainability.

Auditability is important to ensure compliance with security controls.

Technical, procedural, and administrative security controls must be auditable, well documented, and adhered to by all team members.

Visibility is generally a good management technique, but it is very important in a DevSecOps environment.

This means organizations have a robust monitoring system to measure operational heartbeats, send alerts, raise awareness when changes or cyberattacks occur, and be accountable throughout the project lifecycle.

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