How DevSecOps can Eliminate Security Losses Worth $6 Trillion

The DevSecOps market size will grow to USD 5.9 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 31.2%. – Market Research Report

Application Security Testing has been traditionally performed at the end of the development process, usually as an afterthought.

The Reason?

The urgency to push a product to the market at the right time, as soon as possible.

“Just ship it,” has become a cliche term in the IT product development cycle. While shipping as fast as possible can give a business an edge over the competition, there is one thing that is usually handled with levity: Security.

We are edging closer and closer to losing opportunities worth $6 trillion because of subpar application security.

Although agile software development methodologies such as DevOps, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment focus on advanced and robust application development processes, security remains the only factor that continues to abide by the traditional waterfall approach.

In today’s digital Darwinian era, it has become imperative for organizations to take a proactive stance by incorporating security into their existing DevOps pipeline for speeding up the secure releases of their applications, thus paving the way for a new approach, called DevSecOps.

What is DevSecOps?

Development + Security + Operations, in short, DevSecOps is the philosophy of integrating automated security processes into an agile IT and DevOps framework to merge two separate goals—speed of delivery and secure code—into a single seamless, streamlined, and transparent process.

The goal of the DevSecOps approach is to break the security silos and incorporate them into all stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC). In a nutshell, the security is not being saved for the final stages of application development. It is implemented at the right time and at the right level.

Why do we Need DevSecOps?

Security is one of the biggest challenges that can have dire consequences if handled inefficiently: it can act as a death knell for many businesses. Toyota, for instance, experienced two big data breaches in just five weeks, potentially affecting more than 3.1 million people.

“People ask me all the time, ‘What keeps you up at night?’ And I say, ‘Spicy Mexican food, weapons of mass destruction, and cyberattacks.” –Dutch Ruppersberger, US Representative

If cyberattacks are keeping Dutch Ruppersberger awake, the CxOs without a security plan must be definitely having sleepless nights too.

Security is not just meant to be added as a top layer in the development process. Rather, it should be baked into the entire process to enable the team to witness the potential of agile methodologies without compromising the goal of building secure code.

Benefits of DevSecOps Approach

Following are the benefits of incorporating DevSecOps strategy to your business model:

• Increased Customer Trust: The customers may not be able to tell if a company is implementing a DevSecOps strategy at first, but it becomes evident over time. Consistent security breaches cause a product to lose many, if not all of its users since nobody trusts a product with breached security.

 

• Improved Work Culture: When everybody in the organization is on the same page with respect to the company’s stance on security, it becomes easier to communicate. Teamwork is more effective when everybody understands the core values of a company or a product.

 

• Cost Reduction: Implementing DevSecOps strategy helps in reducing the cost as the security issues get detected and fixed early during the development phases, along with increasing the speed of product delivery.

 

• Holistic Approach: Both the pipeline and application remain secure with integrated frameworks. This eventually helps build an end-to-end and comprehensive defense throughout the production environment.

DevSecOps Challenges

Every successful security plan rests on three intersecting pillars: People, Process, and Technology. The DevSecOps approach is no different. Its successful implementation relies on better collaboration between Development, Security, and Operations.

Nonetheless, a rift between the development and security teams is inevitable in most cases while implementing a DevSecOps strategy.

Businesses trying to adapt DevSecOps often face collaboration issues, along with the following challenges:

• People Challenge: Any change begins with people, and in the case of DevSecOps too, people are the starting point of its implementation. In the case of DevOps, it’s already a challenge to form a cohesive team of Dev and Ops, and adding a third team of security, which is known to work in silos, amplifies the complexity.

 

• Process Challenge: Speed, Security, and Quality are three main factors of DevSecOps that define an ideal product. Since the advent of the product development environment, security comes at the end of development. Thus, getting security to adapt to the DevOps process adds to the challenge.

 

• Technology Challenge: Security testing tools and their integration in CI/CD pipeline is vital for DevSecOps success. Shifting left approach and using tools to cover all possible security tests and attempting as much no-touch automation as possible along by using AI capabilities will be important for DevSecOps success.

With DevSecOps, this traditional and siloed mindset of a project manager gets broken down, and it almost becomes impossible for a threat to penetrate the application.

DevSecOps Best Practices

Implementing DevSecOps strategy is an elaborate process. While there are no standard textbook steps that can help serve as a roadmap, here’s a list of best practices that every business should reflect on while embarking upon a DevSecOps journey:

• Enforce Frequent Security Checks: All software dependencies should be checked very frequently as 78% of security vulnerabilities in software result from indirect dependencies: open-source dependencies. It is also common to find that these dependencies become obsolete after a while, thereby increasing the chances of a security vulnerability.

 

• Use Security Dashboards: 63% of businesses do not have an effective way to track threats, and security dashboards can be of help here. Dashboards provide insights from the available data, making it easier to discover attempts to breach the security. With the help of dashboards, it becomes simpler to set up real-time automatic alerts and responses when there is an imminent threat.

 

• Regular Security Training: Every developer tries to make the software feature-rich while missing the security implications of the code that make the product extremely vulnerable. To ingrain the culture of a security-first approach in product development, it’s crucial to empower the developers with security training regularly.

Conclusion

In today’s rapidly dynamic environment, traditional security practices simply do not work. The nature of advanced security attacks observed in the recent past necessitates the requirement of an integrated and holistic solution for a secure product. And DevSecOps is the answer.

The need of the hour is to keep pace with the competitors by pushing out products faster and more aggressively with security at the forefront of every phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC).