Book Image

Implementing DevSecOps Practices

By : Vandana Verma Sehgal
Book Image

Implementing DevSecOps Practices

By: Vandana Verma Sehgal

Overview of this book

DevSecOps is built on the idea that everyone is responsible for security, with the goal of safely distributing security decisions at speed and scale to those who hold the highest level of context. This practice of integrating security into every stage of the development process helps improve both the security and overall quality of the software. This book will help you get to grips with DevSecOps and show you how to implement it, starting with a brief introduction to DevOps, DevSecOps, and their underlying principles. After understanding the principles, you'll dig deeper into different topics concerning application security and secure coding before learning about the secure development lifecycle and how to perform threat modeling properly. You’ll also explore a range of tools available for these tasks, as well as best practices for developing secure code and embedding security and policy into your application. Finally, you'll look at automation and infrastructure security with a focus on continuous security testing, infrastructure as code (IaC), protecting DevOps tools, and learning about the software supply chain. By the end of this book, you’ll know how to apply application security, safe coding, and DevSecOps practices in your development pipeline to create robust security protocols.
Table of Contents (25 chapters)
1
Part 1:DevSecOps – What and How?
3
Part 2: DevSecOps Principles and Processes
8
Part 3:Technology
15
Part 4: Tools
17
Part 5: Governance and an Effective Security Champions Program
20
Part 6: Case Studies and Conclusion

Understanding the shift from DevOps to DevSecOps

Picture DevOps as a dynamic duo of superhero teams, with developers and operations joining forces to save the business world. Their mission? Pumping out awesome apps and updates to wow the crowd. But then, DevSecOps enters the scene – a supercharged version of our dynamic duo. This time, they’ve got a new sidekick: security (Sec). By weaving Sec into the mix, we’re not just cranking out cool features; we’re making sure they’re as safe as a bank vault.

DevSecOps is an extension of DevOps. DevSecOps was introduced to increase the speed of DevOps. By integrating security into DevOps processes, operations teams were motivated and measured to stabilize production to meet service-level agreements (SLAs). It was about making new changes, but they needed to be made quickly. This made it look like a lot of things were being left behind.

In recent years, many organizations have evolved their DevOps practices to address their business challenges more successfully. DevOps is a contemporary method for meeting the demands of the business by delivering applications more quickly and of higher quality. DevOps now spans the entire enterprise, affecting processes and data flows and bringing about significant organizational changes. This differs from the past, where it was primarily concerned with just putting the IT services for applications in place.

DevOps continues to gain momentum and evolve every passing day. New technologies are being included as part of it.

The initial idea was to make sure that the communication gap between different teams during development processes could be removed. The communication gap has always been a huge challenge for organizations. Development teams work on developing the features needed by the organization, while the operations team works to make sure the application is working smoothly. At the same time, Sec comes into the picture and becomes a big bottleneck as soon as we talk about embedding security in the different phases of development. It opens up a can of worms that never ends.

We are now observing the adoption of many of the techniques that are used by developers to support more agile and responsive processes. This aids organizations in determining their current situation and possible future directions. The most crucial component of any process or technology is people. Even with the best processes and technologies, results are impossible to achieve without people.

Since we’re talking about DevSecOps, it starts with DevOps, which involves quickly delivering higher-quality software by combining and automating the work of software development, IT operations teams, project managers, and everyone working around the development pipeline. If an organization is willing to move toward DevSecOps from its traditional model, it needs to have DevOps in place. That’s contradictory to earlier development models.

Rather than relying on human intervention, the process aids in monitoring the security workflow. Additionally, it enhances our ability to identify security flaws in the ecosystem. Employees may feel replaced by automation in this way, which could make them resent giving up their current level of administrator authority. To get around the bottlenecks in the software development and deployment process, mostly on the ops side, the initial plan was to simply de-silo dev and ops.