Top 5 Essential DevSecOps Best Practices for Building Secure and Resilient Applications

Welcome, fellow tech enthusiasts, to the thrilling world of DevSecOps! Where a mighty triumvirate in the field of software engineering is formed by development, security, and operations.

Let us lay the groundwork for you before we go into the specifics of best practices. Consider a scenario in which programmers create faultless code, security is as tight as a Fort, and operations are as smooth as silk. Doesn’t that sound like a dream? Well, in the DevSecOps world, that dream can become a reality! However, there is a catch. Following the revered DevSecOps best practices is necessary to reach this utopia. These methods are the pinnacle of software development; they are more than just a list of tips or instructions.

To produce secure and dependable software, DevSecOps is a software development methodology that emphasizes collaboration, communication, and integration among the development, security, and operations teams. Instead of treating security as an afterthought or add-on, DevSecOps strives to include security practices into the software development process from the very beginning.

So, What is DevSecOps?

The term DevSecOps refers to the procedure of incorporating a security layer before beginning the software development lifecycle. It can be extended to cover development and operations to integrate security teams in the software lifecycle.

Incorporating security into software from the beginning has emerged as the clear-cut answer to maintaining security. By doing this, businesses can avoid any potential problems from falling behind in security. In the long run, this approach will gradually but surely dominate the software development industry.

When it comes to creating secure software while also attempting to keep up with the speed and scale of the market, there has always been something of a paradox for many IT firms.

Businesses frequently forego security to maintain their lead in terms of speed to market. DevSecOps adoption and incorporating security into software from the outset have emerged as clear solutions to this issue.

What are the top 5 DevSecOps Best Practices?

Below are six best practices for implementing DevSecOps:

1. Automate Security Testing: Since IT has separate tooling for security, security has long been a significant problem. Including security tooling in the pipeline would be more straightforward and more effective. One of the major challenges for the teams today is that they need an understanding of the tools and processes that help build security into the software. Letting teams achieve this goal is vital to building secure software. By automating security testing, vulnerabilities can be found more quickly, decreasing the chance of human error. This can involve incorporating automated security testing into the software development pipeline and running automated vulnerability scans.

Configuring security integrations while scaling requires automation to maintain stability. Automation includes DevOps adoption automatically, and DevSecOps is no different. Automation helps teams adopt DevSecOps best practices by using security tools and procedures. Before starting any process, it’s critical to determine which tasks can be fully automated and which need manual labor.

2. Leveraging Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) and DevSecOps Tools 

Software development, testing, and deployment procedures can be streamlined and automated using Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) and DevSecOps tools. 

Modern software development requires the use of CI/CD and DevSecOps tools, particularly for DevSecOps. With the aid of these tools, teams can increase collaboration, shorten time to market, cut costs, raise quality, and increase agility. Small development teams can produce better software with fewer resources, quicker turnaround times, and less vulnerability by automating tasks, sharing information, and ensuring secure coding practices. It’s critical to implement these tools comprehensively and to put special emphasis on creating a collaborative culture of ongoing improvement throughout the entire development process. Ultimately, utilizing CI/CD and DevSecOps tools is a very humane way to develop and deploy software, as it prioritizes the well-being and satisfaction of all involved stakeholders while valuing both efficiency and quality.

3. Well-defined access control

The DevSecOps implementation of Access Control is a critical step in ensuring software programs’ integrity and security. By using access control, you can easily manage who has access to what data and resources in the system. This minimizes the risk of data breaches and cyberattacks by ensuring that critical information is only available to authorized individuals. Teams can cooperate while upholding high-security standards by integrating access control mechanisms into the DevSecOps process. This makes it possible for businesses to fulfill compliance obligations, safeguard their intellectual property, and gain the trust of their clients. 

Additionally, integrating access control into DevSecOps is a remarkably compassionate way to develop software since it puts people’s privacy and security first while fostering innovation and progress. Only authorized users should have access to sensitive information and resources, which can be helped by access control. Multi-factor authentication, least privilege access, and using security groups to limit access to particular resources are some examples of access controls that can be put into place.

4. KPIs and Corrective measures

Adoption of DevSecOps is usually iterative; thus, some failures will inevitably occur during continuous integration and assessment. However, the team should seize this chance to grow and learn from these setbacks. A DevSecOps pipeline is not fully embracing DevSecOps if it does not report a failure or act upon one. It’s important to have a way to gauge success or failure while following DevSecOps best practices. This is accomplished by gathering information on the many elements and characteristics contributing to DevSecOps and extracting practical metrics from that information. An all-encompassing metrics program integrates people, processes, and technology elements so that you can see what’s working and what isn’t.

Metrics must demonstrate where failures originate, not only when individuals need to follow clearly defined processes but also when people need to use the appropriate tools effectively. This can be achieved by ensuring that data is collected at each level of the security process. Integrations and automation can then help reliably collect all the data points needed for metrics.

5. Compliance and Governance

Tracking usage and vulnerabilities with open-source governance tools is excellent, but other methods should be used. It is essential to put an open-source governance framework in place to hold people accountable and guarantee that adequate measures are taken to avoid deploying insecure software. Traditional governance frameworks impede DevSecOps’ success and slow down the delivery of new software. Security testing and other governance tasks should be automated as much as feasible to address this issue. The term “governance as code” refers to governing or making decisions using coding software.

Get support from all team members, allow the development and operations teams to collaborate, and foster an environment where everyone can offer ideas and solutions to construct a compliance and governance model that works for everyone participating in a project.

Planning Your DevSecOps Strategy

The best way to gauge the performance of your DevSecOps approach is by putting best practices to use and gathering data. This information may take the shape of different DevSecOps characteristics or facts from which we can extract significant metrics. A well-defined metric system considers all technology elements, people, and processes and is specified holistically. This makes it possible to understand successes or failures.

For instance, the analytics should pinpoint the strategies used to avoid adopting a clearly defined system or problems brought on by ineffective tooling. Getting pertinent information from every stage of the pipeline for security tasks is crucial. Wherever practicable and regularly, automation can be used in the system to gather essential data points. Doing so can save time and effort by avoiding time-consuming manual data entry tasks and free up more time for other business-related activities.

Why DevSecOps Best Practices?

DevSecOps best practices are crucial because they ensure that software development processes are safe, effective, and efficient. It is essential to incorporate security procedures into the DevOps process because doing so helps to guard against security lapses and vulnerabilities that could lead to data loss, service outages, or financial losses.

The following are some of the factors that make best practices crucial for DevSecOps:

• Improving Security: Security is integrated into the software development lifecycle at every stage, from design to deployment, thanks to best practices. This lowers the likelihood of security breaches by assisting in early vulnerability identification and mitigation.

• Ensuring Compliance: Best practices ensure that software development procedures adhere to all necessary rules and guidelines, including PCI-DSS, GDPR, and HIPAA.

• Enhancing Quality: By incorporating thorough automated testing, and continuous integration and deployment, best practices help to ensure that software is of high quality. Ensuring that software is dependable, stable, and secure helps to lower the likelihood of bugs and defects.

• Facilitating Collaboration: Best practices support communication and cooperation between operations teams, security experts, and developers. Having a shared understanding of the security requirements and risks among all stakeholders is made possible by this collaboration, which guarantees that security considerations are taken into account throughout the entire development process.

DevSecOps is more than just a buzzword. It’s a methodology that empowers organizations to produce secure, high-quality software more quickly and effectively. You can make sure that security is built into each stage of your software development lifecycle, from planning and coding to testing and deployment, by putting these five best practices into practice.

To achieve your DevSecOps objectives, keep in mind to prioritize security from the beginning, automate whenever practical, and work collaboratively across teams. By implementing these best practices, you can strengthen the security of your software, lower the possibility of security incidents, and increase user and customer confidence.

The transition of your business to DevSecOps is a significant undertaking with numerous potential issues, both known and unknown. It’s critical to keep in mind that DevSecOps requires a comprehensive plan to become a reality for any company; it is not a one-size-fits-all solution or a golden pipeline. The aforementioned best practices can undoubtedly aid in directing events in the right direction.

DevSecOps has much bigger/more ambitious goals than just performing security tests. It concerns the role automation plays in security and the multiplicative/diversifying effects of information beyond a group of security experts, which reduces the risks when information reaches the end user. To address all of the issues mentioned above without slowing down the delivery of software, however, is a difficult task.

Kickstart your DevSecOps journey with Ozone

The security tools and other components must be up to date to keep up with the rapid adoption of cloud-native technologies and the use of open-source components in Modern Apps. In the most recent and current environments, conventional security tools and procedures are no longer helpful or sufficient.

Though many industry participants claim to understand security automation, relatively few actually live up to their claims. Ozone is one such CI/CD platform with completely integrated features that may assist you in automating the entire process without any trouble, hassle, or strain.

To get started on your journey, book a demo with our team today!