In the tech world, maintaining strong security standards is necessary for success. Consumers are increasingly concerned about company integrity and its ability to keep their personal data private. Yet, all over the world, hackers are becoming much more competent and savvier with their approach to malware. Anything from bad code to misconfigured servers leaves you open to vulnerability.
A study from Panda Security found that 230,000 new malware samples are being launched each day. Furthermore, 27% of all existing malware was launched in 2017 alone. Cybercrime damage cost businesses millions each year, and no one is safe; it’s naive to assume that major cyber hacks are delegated to bigger corporations only. In fact, small businesses and startups often fall victim, as they are more likely to skip some of the security steps that big businesses employ.
Maintaining impenetrable code and making security a top priority will help your business avoid a financial disaster. One survey found that 76% of consumers would take their business elsewhere if they learned of a company’s negligent data-handling. A security breach is also associated with non-compliance, which can hurt your reputation and damage your long-term credibility.
The DevOps Role
The DevOps philosophy can help you improve your code security and keep you and your customers and clients safe. The DevOps methodology brings together development and operations teams within tech organizations. The purpose of this is to improve feedback throughout the development stages, shorten the development lifecycle, and create a more cohesive internal teams.
In a traditional development cycle, you’ll find a seperate development team working to build out a product according to specifications. The operations team, on the other hand, is responsible for maintenance and communicating with customers. This could easily create gaps between what one team sees and wants and what the other team sees and wants. In turn, this creates a darker company culture. In order to keep everyone on the same path, headed towards the same goals, a DevOps approach is necessary. For instance, with CI / CD pipeline for devs and Helm repositories by jFrog, you can ensure the entire development and delivery process is optimized from start to finish.
But of course, DevOps isn’t just about helping tech organizations churn out code quicker and bridging the gap between internal departments. DevOps is also quite effective at helping businesses improve their security; an area all teams can agree on.
Continuous Monitoring
Continuous monitoring plays a major role in DevOps. With continuous monitoring, you can respond quicker to shifting customer needs, as well as identify security issues and areas for security improvement. Inherently, DevOps allows for transparent feedback across organizations, and through to stakeholders. Your monitoring strategy should also have the ability to collect and analyze logs automatically, making it easy to quickly identify exposures.
Automating Security Checks
Each time you deploy an application or feature, there are multiple security requirements to address. However, when it comes to iterative agile development, addressing all potential security issues could easily lead to major project delays, and isn’t a sustainable way of running your security checks.
With a layered approach, you can make gradual and continuous upgrades and improvements. Each time you build, you can enforce further security layers and use security test automation to quickly locate any read flags. When you build security testing into your development, you’re able to achieve your security goals better than ever. This is also referred to as “shift left.” If your software is secured automatically from the beginning, there’s less to worry about as the code becomes more and more complex.
Cloud-based tools like evident.io can scan your configurations to ensure you’re using the best security practices, while other tools like Contrast Security help identify potential security issues in real-time. With automation, you can move much quicker and pusher higher quality products.
Auditing & Compliance
In a dynamic cloud environment, creatinging and maintaining system security plans in a dynamic cloud environment can be a major pain—especially if you’re manually attending to these tasks. Industries like healthcare and finance are very strictly regulated, and with a traditional, siloed development approach, addressing compliance could stall the business for weeks at a time. “DevOps tools and practices establish compliance through consistency,” Derek Weeks, vice president of Sonatype told DevOps.com. “They help improve compliance by reducing complexity and variability within the environments. For test and operations teams, configurations, tests and deployments can be automated to ensure execution is consistent. For development teams, consistent versions of binaries ensures use of compliant components, leading to more compliant applications. The automation capabilities of DevOps tools enable consistent, automated execution of compliant practices.”
