What is DevSecOps and why is it so important?

Increasing cybercrime and cybersecurity threats in recent years have brought about the new term DevSecOps in the software industry. To keep up with the modern application and software development needs, it is critical for developers and enterprises to adopt DevSecOps.

As technology builders and maintainers, we build, deploy, and maintain applications in order to help our end users by making their day-to-day existence a little bit easier and more streamlined. These end users trust us with their time and data, so it's important that we take all necessary steps to protect them in their online journeys.

This article provides an overview of DevSecOps and explores why it's so valuable in software development today.

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps is the combination of three terms -- development, security, and operations. It is the adoption of security from the beginning of a software or application development lifecycle.

In the past, security was added to an application late in the lifecycle, after the development phase. The advancement of cloud platforms, microservices, and containers created a bottleneck to the traditional development approach. Security was unable to keep up with the rapid releases as developers adopted agile and DevOps practices for modern application development and deployment.

DevSecOps integrates security with DevOps by addressing issues as they emerge within Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines.

The importance and benefits of DevSecOps

DevSecOps combines application security smoothly into DevOps and agile processes. It addresses security issues as they occur, when they are easier, faster, and less expensive to fix.

The emergence of cloud platforms, dynamic provisioning, and shared resources has led to rapid application development. Through DevOps, development cycles are fast and frequent. Iterations take place within weeks or sometimes days. DevSecOps allows developers and security engineers to connect the power of agile methodologies.

DevSecOps offers many benefits to companies and developers during the product lifecycle:

• Incorporating security into DevOps helps speed up iterations.
• DevSecOps helps in developing high quality products without compliance issues.
• It helps developers think critically, understand security requirements, and design the software properly from the beginning.
• It eliminates manual configuration of security consoles, which reduces cycle time.
• Security functions like identity and access management, firewalls, and vulnerability scans can be automated throughout the DevOps cycle.
• Vulnerabilities are identified earlier which helps to avoid cyber-attacks.
• It helps improve communication and collaboration between teams.

Evolving approaches to development: Traditional vs. Shift Left

Existing security and compliance tools weren't designed to keep up with the quick pace of change that DevOps requires.

Traditionally, security was brought in during the test/deploy and operations phases which often led to delays in application releases and deadlines because vulnerabilities were detected in the later stages of development.

Shift Left is a practice that's designed to ensure the inclusion of security throughout the entire application development lifecycle. Its use is intended to detect and prevent vulnerabilities during early development stages. By integrating security at all stages from strategy to operations, you can improve quality by moving tasks to the left early in the lifecycle. This helps bring the security mindset to the codefront.

Shift Left helps you avoid re-doing complex architectures, and balances security with other requirements by detecting bottlenecks early on. It helps you secure your toolchains and code from the beginning of the application development process.

Snyk security tools

Snyk security tools help developers find and fix vulnerabilities in application code in real time. They can be easily integrated with application toolchains on IBM Cloud. They offer many integration options for a range of tool chains, including Tekton, Terraform, and more via Code Risk Analyzer.

This integration brings automated testing to pipelines and creates the ability to detect vulnerabilities with a number of elements as part of the deployment pipeline process.

Snyk Open Source

Snyk Open Source scans package manifests from applications for known vulnerabilities within open source packages using the Snyk vulnerability database. This scan works at the package version level and can recommend remediation if possible that includes version updates or patches depending on the vulnerability type.

Snyk Code

Snyk Code AI engine utilizes learned AI datasets to identify potential vulnerabilities, leveraging known vulnerability types matched against possible code-level combinations. This helps identify code syntax usage and the avoidance of surfacing vulnerabilities within code sets at the codefront.

Snyk Container

Snyk Container scans for known vulnerabilities within containers as part of continuous deployment. With the ability to automatically update known container vulnerabilities, the scan can also identify emerging issues and known vulnerabilities in source libraries and dependencies.

Snyk Infrastructure as Code

Snyk Infrastructure as Code enables scanning of configuration files to bring a level of security to IAC deployments. It uses the vulnerability database to identify issues arising during deployment as part of the toolchain, and also alerts users to new issues as they are identified.

These 4 approaches to securing application development from code to infrastructure bring automated suggested fixes as pull requests back into source repositories.

The Snyk integration is also able to generate a bill of materials that's used in the scanned application. This functionality allows you to compare dependencies with respect to base branches in source code.

IBM Cloud Pak for Security

IBM has been ranked as a leader in security services by independent research firms. There are multiple security services available for developers on IBM Cloud, including IBM Cloud App ID, IBM Cloud Hyper Protect Services, IBM Cloud Security Advisor, and many more.

For enterprises, IBM offers an open security platform called IBM Cloud Pak for Security that connects to your existing data sources and generates deeper insights. It provides DevSecOps support that can help you achieve continuous security and manage threats. The platform helps you find and respond to threats and risks in a timely manner regardless of where your data resides -- on third-party tools, on-premises, or in multiple cloud environments.

Summary

In today's software culture, security is a critical component of DevOps. Adopting DevSecOps reduces time, increases delivery speed, and helps developers create high-quality, secure applications.

To start your DevSecOps journey and learn more about the concepts and technologies covered here, check out these helpful resources:

• IBM Cloud Learn Hub: What is DevSecOps?
• DevSecOps.org
• IBM Cloud Pak for Security
• Snyk security tools

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Steve Coochin, Senior Developer Advocate at Snyk, for his assistance with this article.