Transition Point – How To Implement A DevSecOps Strategy

As more businesses adopted an agile approach to development over the last decade, these companies discovered that they required a greater degree of connection between their development and operations professionals. This gave rise to the field of DevOps, which is both a philosophy and a tool designed to more quickly deliver market-ready services and flexibly address problems as they arise.

More recently, though, the DevOps world realized that it was missing something: security. While there’s security testing in the conventional DevOps process, DevSecOps takes security further. Now the challenge is to get businesses to make the shift.

How can you sell DevSecOps to your organization? It’s all about benefits. Focusing on these upsides of DevSecOps can quickly convert a hesitant business into an eager adopter.

IMAGE: PEXELS

Avoid Compliance Crises

When conventional DevOps programs evaluate programs for security, they will typically run regression testing and code tests to make sure that the program doesn’t have any major holes. What DevSecOps professionals see in this approach, however, is something superficial and a potential public relations nightmare.

DevSecOps seeks to replace this approach with OWASP best practices, HIPAA compliance, and even the employment of ethical hackers. When something goes wrong, it’s easy to blame the negligent company that fails to look beyond the basic code, but a strong DevSecOps approach can insulate your business from scandal.

Build Connections And Skills

One of the major barriers to implementing DevSecOps is that there’s a significant skills gap in the industry, such that there are far more application developers than security professionals – and what’s more, the ones that do exist don’t tend to work well together because they don’t speak the same language.

Part of shifting your business to a DevSecOps model, then, involves eliminating knowledge silos within your organization. This requires cross-training and co-mentorship, but it also means that you retain greater organizational knowledge during transitions and can lead to greater productivity in the long-term.

Leadership Positioning

While there are plenty of technical issues at hand when it comes to implementing DevSecOps, one of the advantages of pushing to adopt such programs now is that it will place your business in a leadership position within your industry. There are, at present, so few standards for what DevSecOps should look like that your business can set its own standards and define its terms for yourself.

For example, while DevSecOps involves practices like vulnerability scanning and runtime protection, it’s also dependent on a handful of existing policies like HIPAA and GDPR. As your business develops its own security standards based on your industry’s needs, you can also automate those practices for stricter enforcement.

It’s All About Speed

DevOps was, from the start, all about speed. Agile software development addressed problems as they arose, but it was unprepared for the sophistication of modern hackers. Adding security to this framework means introducing more moving parts to your company’s digital transformation, which could potentially slow it down. But, it’s a temporary slowdown in the service of long-term productivity and performance.

Without the added security component, all of the agility driven by DevOps is moot. DevSecOps brings agility to yet another aspect of your business’s performance and makes just-in-time learning and response to the norm.

Like any professional transition, making the shift to a DevSecOps framework isn’t easy, but it is necessary – so don’t delay. Otherwise, you may find that the other businesses are sailing smoothly through security crises while you’re stuck in the trenches.

If you are interested in even more business-related articles and information from us here at Bit Rebels, then we have a lot to choose from.

IMAGE: PEXELS