Several practices of DevOps offer a massive opportunity for enhanced security. Whether it is automation, fast feedback loops, consistent release practices, or collaboration, DevOps offers an abundance of opportunities for integrating enhanced security measures and providing inbuilt security components in your procedures.
Secure DevOps, commonly known as DevSecOps addresses code quality issues and reliability assurance. It bridges the gap between development and security teams and helps to reduce the contention that traditional approaches to security can sometimes bring about. DevOps depends heavily on automation covering the entire pipeline ranging from code development and testing to infrastructure configuration and deployment. With secure DevOps, the automation includes security audits as well.
In this article, we will discuss several ways DevOps practices strengthen security and compliance.
- Initial Identification of Risks
Instead of incorporating security measures at the end of the development cycle, organizations can carry out a quality software development process by integrating it at the initial stages. This helps to identify and mitigate potential risks early in the development process without risking the continued velocity of the DevOps process.
Organizations can incorporate security and compliance controls as an integral part of DevOps practices from the start to create an effective and viable security layer for all applications and environments. This will serve as a solid foundation to ensure streamlined, efficient, and proactive security and compliance in the long run.
- Automation
DevOps strengthens security and compliance with the help of automated processes by:
- Reducing the risk of human error-based security flaws
- More efficient tests
- More predictable processes
- Ease of identifying loopholes
- Enhanced Visibility
By implementing DevOps with the help of different tools for several functions, organizations gain enhanced visibility across the entire development life cycle. By gaining such visibility and control, they create a closed-loop automated pipeline for resolving security threats. This way, better security is ensured, as enhanced visibility across the entire development cycle makes testing and reporting of security threats much easier.
- Quick Rectification
DevOps enables organizations to speed up their development, testing, and deployment processes. Moreover, some DevOps platforms also offer meticulous tracking, which simplifies the search for the exact component that requires more attention. By providing developers with access to the exact information (such as which version is deployed in which environment and what are the exact components), it facilitates quick rectification of the security errors that surface while ensuring quicker update roll-outs, consistent deployment process, and appropriate workflows.
- Security of Codes as well as the Environments
Deploying DevOps processes from the initial production stages can help organizations to create hyper-efficient, adequate, and sensible security stages for their applications. Creating repeatable, traceable, and consistent manageable systems with the help of DevOps practices can enable organizations to secure the code as well as the environments, as tracing access details like who accessed them and at what time they were accessed is possible.
- Automated Compliance Reporting
DevOps systems make compliance auditing much easier. DevOps provides traceability ranging from code changes to releases as it covers the entire pipeline. Your automated DevOps platform automatically logs in information in great detail, relating to your automated building cycles, test cycles, integration cycles, deployment procedures, and release process. Such detailed information plays a crucial role in forming your audit trail, security logs, and compliance report. All of this is done automatically without any manual effort, hence the chances of manual errors in ensuring compliance adherence are significantly reduced as well.
- Ensuring Governance while Enabling Developers
The emphasis of DevOps is to streamline procedures across the pipeline for:
- Consistent Testing
- Consistent Development
- Consistent Release Practices
Organizations can configure their DevOps tools to enable developers to work while ensuring automated access controls and compliance. Organizations can establish internal DevOps services for shared repositories, deployment procedures, and workflows to enable developers to access infrastructure according to their needs while implementing automated access control, security measures, and configuration parameters parallelly.
Organizations can also ensure identification, tracking, monitoring, and management of instances across all environments according to the preset guidelines.
- Continuous Testing and Monitoring
With Secure DevOps, organizations can ensure continuous testing and monitoring of procedures. It leads to enhanced security and compliances as it makes the process more efficient. It identifies all security threats, limits them, and enables organizations to eliminate compliance violations.
Integrating continuous testing and monitoring at a granular level into the pipeline enables organizations to make security a natural component of the entire application design process.
Conclusion
Today, organizations all around the world have begun to adopt DevOps practices in their processes as they have proven to surface security threats quicker, enabled teams to acknowledge threats in time and reduced security problems in the entire pipeline. DevOps can act as a significant enforcer of compliance, audit requirements, and security specifications. With the help of DevOps practices, organizations can strengthen their security and compliance.
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