DevSecOps – Where DevOps and Security Meet

The speed of software delivery has accelerated dramatically over the last decade. Company’s that aren’t adapting and innovating soon find themselves behind the competition. This has resulted in a mindset change on how software is delivered and, more importantly how software is checked for security vulnerabilities. The practices used in DevOps provide a great opportunity to improve security and automate your governance and compliance initiatives.

DevSecOps Governance Practices You Can Adopt Today

Here’s a helpful checklist of some DevSecOps Governance practices your company should be leveraging on a day-to-day basis.

1. Define your security requirements – establish a minimum-security baseline that takes into account the unique security and compliance requirements your organization must follow. Implement these requirements using a combination of Azure Blueprints and Azure Policies. Where possible bake these initiatives into your DevOps processes and CI/CD pipelines.
2. Define Metrics and Compliance reporting – define specific metrics that surface security performance insights and incidents. Make these visible to the greater organization via reporting and dashboards.
3. Know what’s in your application stack – nearly all software makes use of third-party components or open-source technologies. Analyze and implement policies that set governance over acceptable use of third-party components and implement alerting for violations.
4. Use tools and automation – shift-left your security posture assessment whenever possible. Tools and extensions to developer IDE’s are capable of providing near instant feedback and just-in-time learning. Static Application Security Testing will alert developers when introducing security vulnerabilities before new code is committed to the code repository.
5. Guard Your Credentials – during the pre-commit stage your CI/CD process. Avoid storing secrets and API keys in source control and instead make use of Azure Key Vault.
6. Use monitoring and alerts – it’s vitally important to monitor applications, infrastructure and network using the built-in monitoring capabilities of Azure. Azure Governance policies allow you to monitor for performance and security-related issues and alert when resources are out of compliance with your policy initiatives.

DevSecOps Transformation

Adopting the security practices outlined in the above list can serve as a important catalyst for your organization's DevSecOps transformation. By implementing tools and processes that leverage Azure policy initiatives, teams can learn security best practices as they go and avoid introducing gaps or vulnerabilities in their cloud apps and services. InCycle Software has worked with many clients to help them plan out collaborative governance practices, we can help your organization implement security best practices and accelerate your security governance adoption.

To learn more about enterprise governance, download the Modern Governance Playbook!