The Complete Guide to Boosting Cloud Security Management With DevSecOps

May 06, 2021

Digital Transformation | 5 min READ

The COVID-19 pandemic of 2020 proved to be a tipping point for enterprise digital transformation and app modernization on the cloud. Before the pandemic, CIOs were wary of a move to the cloud because of the security challenges it presents. As the pandemic forced their hands, enterprises had to build an application cloud modernization strategy almost overnight, making cloud security management a top mandate for enterprise CIOs and CTOs.

It’s imperative to weave security into every stage of application development to build and scale faster while meeting regulatory compliance and bolstering cloud security management. Security cannot be an afterthought anymore.

Enter DevSecOps - short for development, security, and operations.

Braj Panda

Former Director

Global Digital Practice

Birlasoft

What is DevSecOps in the Cloud?

According to CSA (Cloud Security Alliance), DevSecOps is the integration of continuous security principles, processes, and technology into DevOps culture, practices, and workflows. It brings together the traditionally siloed departments of development, infrastructure, operations, and information security to secure software development.

DevSecOps also puts the onus of accountability on every IT team member, making everyone - from a developer to a network engineer - a security owner. With DevSecOps, IT teams can run automated security tests throughout the application development life cycle on the cloud. As a result, speed, agility, innovation, and security become a top priority.

Stay Ahead

Visit our Digital Transformation page

LEARN MORE

The Need for DevSecOps in the Cloud

DevOps focuses on developing applications at an accelerated rate to maintain a competitive advantage in a dynamic environment. Modern trends such as microservices, open-source, serverless computing, and API-first applications are built on the pillars of DevOps. While concentrating on the speed and frequency of releases, security and compliance can take a back seat.

Enterprises must adopt DevSecOps to integrate security into DevOps at every stage rather than retrofitting it later through conventional, perimeter-based models. Such traditional measures won’t be enough in a cloud-native environment as apps can be developed and deployed anytime, anywhere.

There’s evidence to support the need for security to be incorporated into the DevOps pipeline. The CSA has found that organizations can control security-related performance even in the initial days of development on the cloud when security is one of the guiding principles of software design and development.

With DevSecOps, enterprises can:

Reduce wasted time, efforts, and resources in fixing processes for security risks
Innovate faster and shorten the time to market because of security automation
Build automated incident reports, making it quicker and easier to detect and fix such incidents
Implement preventive security controls on the cloud
Improve accountability by making security a collective responsibility of every team member

Here’s the best part - DevSecOps helps you automate security controls, reduce the reliance on manual checks, and speed up the entire development process.

The Need for DevSecOps in the Cloud

Click to zoom in

Devsecops Cloud Security – Key Benefits

In an increasingly virtual, hyper-connected world, cyberattacks are bound to happen. Safeguarding against such attacks warrants:

Adopting a zero-trust approach to security
Designing applications for security
Automating quality checks, testing, and reporting
Responding to incidents as and when they occur to minimize the damage done

DevSecOps helps meet the above-mentioned criteria through continuous testing and automation.

Security Automation

There’s a saying in software development: if you do the same thing three times, it’s time to program it. For applications on the cloud, it’s crucial to continuously monitor their performance, deployments of new releases, and perform regular security checks.

Manually taking care of these aspects can lead to insecure software being deployed, making the entire IT architecture vulnerable. The IT team spends more time rework to fix bad code, causing delays and inefficiencies.

Running automated scripts to monitor security and compliance controls is the way forward. With automation, the security checks can:

Be continuous (whenever a new version or patch is deployed)
Reduce bottlenecks in the app development life cycle
Reduce costly downtime
Detect and fix vulnerabilities in real-time

Automation in security helps enterprises meet their compliance and security goals quickly, and at scale.

While initial deployments might lead to delays or issues at the beginning, they can be fixed through subsequent improvements to the workflow.

Faster response and remediation

In a cloud-based architecture, it’s common to modify the code and deploy applications several times a day. It’s crucial to check for vulnerabilities continuously in such an environment. Even a single instance of oversight could be a disastrous and costly mistake.

Besides, whenever data leaks or cyberattacks happen, it’s important to know when you’ve been hacked and fix the issue right away. The longer it takes, the more damage gets done. Real-time, automated security checks that analyze the code as and when it’s written can find defects early. In the event of an incident, timely intervention from the security teams can make a world of difference.

The Complete Guide to Boosting Cloud Security Management With DevSecOps

Key Benefits: Devsecops Cloud Security

Click to zoom in

Reduced vulnerability

Automated vulnerability scanning is another advantage of DevSecOps. When an enterprise adopts a DevSecOps approach, there are regular scans, reviews, and tests to watch for vulnerabilities or potential threats constantly. This is done at two levels:

Using automated code analysis tools (by developers as and when they write code)
Peer reviews with the senior members of the team for quality assurance

Applications get deployed to a production environment only after they pass these tests. Even then, the production environment is monitored to detect any further threats, reducing the vulnerabilities and mitigating the risk of an attack.

Automated Testing

Automated testing is at the heart of DevSecOps. Running automated quality checks at each step:

Removes errors in the code
Documents the results (as reports or logs)
Provides continuous feedback to the team

Key Challenges in Hybrid Cloud Data Management

These tests can be run as frequently as needed with no manual intervention, which reduces human oversight and speeds up app delivery at scale. As a result, security professionals can continuously spend less time on operational tasks and more strategic actions to improve their existing security measures continuously.

The documentation also helps demonstrate the security protocols adopted by an enterprise. In the event of an attack, the enterprise could provide these records to the regulatory bodies investigating the situation as proof of compliance.

Every organization will have a unique cloud modernization journey. However, a major challenge that it’ll face with cloud adoption is security. Relying on traditional security models that worked for on-premise architectures isn’t enough.

Delivering quickly and at scale, while thwarting cyberattacks and complying with rising regulations on data security and privacy puts the spotlight on security. Enterprises are acutely aware of this, as is evident from the rate at which the global DevSecOps market is projected to grow — at a CAGR of 30.76% to reach USD 17.16 billion by 2027.

As cloud becomes more mainstream, DevSecOps practices such as automated quality checks, compliance, and vulnerability tests are destined to become a standard security practice.

Was this article helpful?

Encouraging

Good

Insightful