The evolution of DevOps to DevSecOps
DevOps is a culture, a set of practices that brings together software development and IT operations, which helps shorten the system development lifecycle and provide continuous delivery while maintaining high quality. Today, DevOps has made concepts like continuous integration and continuous delivery very common everywhere, while also encouraging teams to be more agile. DevOps has helped countless teams and organizations adapt quicker, bring down their cost of change, enabled organizations to add cross-functionality collaborations and also improved speed and productivity. Above all, DevOps helps all the processes to be captured in an auditable and replicable way. And over time, this has enabled developers to follow the DevOps processes more diligently and with greater discipline, improving efficiency along the way, there has been an emergence of DevSecOps.
What is DevSecOps?
DevSecOps is the philosophy of integrating security practices within the DevOps culture, together aiming to create a ‘security code’ culture built on ongoing, flexible collaboration between developers, release engineers and security teams.
With DevOps, since there is already enough thrust on the rapid creation of solutions and their quick deployment, security doesn’t’ always make it to the list of priorities, especially because including this at the development stage would slow down the entire process, which wouldn’t work. Thus, security always got retrofitted later on onto the build. This definitely makes maintaining security a huge challenge and open to many vulnerabilities. Eventually the teams began to realize the shortfalls of this practice, and consciously began integrating security right from the outset. This is when DevOps began evolving into DevSecOps. Using the DevSecOps approach, developers could alleviate security issues during the development process itself.
DevSecOps, like DevOps, breaks down the silos within organizations, facilitating greater scope of collaboration, opening up many more opportunities for relevant expertise to be available and helpful, when needed.
How to embrace DevSecOps?
The first step towards adopting a DevSecOps culture is to inculcate the right mindset among the teams. The different teams need to realize the importance of security, that security is not an afterthought. When it comes to building something, security is just as important as logic and algorithms. With DevSecOps this gets addressed effectively as security experts are involved in the process from the very beginning, and everyone collaborates together to develop the build.
DevSecOps doesn’t just begin with security, it involves constantly reviewing security too. This could involve compliance monitoring for PCI and GDPR, devising a process in case the system detects a security threat or vulnerability. Establish a proper review process is essential in DevSecOps. It would definitely need all teams to be trained and made aware of about security through the development journey.
What does the future hold for DevSecOps?
There are two ways this can go. One of the possibilities is the emergence of NoOps. In NoOps, the solutions will feature everything they need to, right from the outset – be it security, code standards, libraries or even legislation protocols. Everything is automated, teams monitor and verify the software, and raise questions at that time, if required. Manual, human-based operations are more or less eliminated. With this approach, the biggest advantage would be that a higher level of security and resilience is almost guaranteed in everything, since everything has to meet specific standards in the process.
The second possibility is that different types of Ops could come in. For instance, Ops augmented with machine learning could become MLOps. Similarly, Ops could merge with different technologies, frameworks and platforms to create a different set of practices, encouraging collaboration and aiming for improvement all along the way.
Irrespective of which possibility becomes a reality, DevOps, and now DevSecOps is the way to go for organizations everywhere.
You could also join the DevOps and DevSecOps bandwagon, by getting trained and certified in the field of DevOps. Cognixia – world’s leading digital talent transformation company offers globally recognized training and certification programs in the field of DevOps. Our carefully crafted training programs are updated regularly to incorporate all the latest developments in the field. Our courses uses multiple projects and discussion on a range of real-life scenarios and use cases to ensure that all participants gain a thorough understanding of all the concepts covered during the training sessions. To know more about our DevOps training and certification program, visit https://cognixia.com/courses/devops-plus-training
