DevSecOps Can Help You Balance Security and Efficiency

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DevSecOps Can Help You Balance Security and Efficiency

Recognizing the need for faster, more automated development-to-production processes, almost 75% of organizations have adopted DevOps practices. Yet, security remains a significant gap.

In a 2021 Osterman Research study, just 56% of security professionals felt confident that their development and engineering teams could develop secure applications. Most organizations understand the importance of addressing security early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Nevertheless, security is still “bolted on” to application development projects due to cultural, training, and resource gaps.

Survey respondents expressed a desire to “shift left” and integrate security into every phase of the SDLC. However, only 42% of security practitioners said they had the time to address known security issues. Only 50% of front-line security pros and just 27% of front-line developers felt that application security is a critical part of their responsibilities. Not surprisingly, 81% of developers admitted to knowingly releasing vulnerable code.

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DevSecOps can address these challenges by injecting security into DevOps practices. It provides organizations with a framework for security testing and a cultural approach that makes security a shared responsibility. It also integrates automated testing tools into the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to detect vulnerabilities before code is released to production.

At DeSeMa, we can help you learn more about DevSecOps, as well as provide you with the necessary IT security to feel confident in your system. Continue reading to learn more about DevSecOps and its benefits, and reach out to our team to start improving your system today!

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Third-Party Software Risks

Very few software development shops have implemented any automated security testing tools. Occasionally, they will have static application security testing (SAST), which analyzes source code for security flaws. However, SAST tools only look for particularly bad code. It's not the same as running a penetration test against the environment.

In a more advanced implementation, organizations use dynamic application security testing (DAST), which builds out all the source code components and tests them with vulnerability detection tools. This allows developers to see if there's a problem in their source code, the operating system, or a library they’ve pulled down from somewhere else.

Third-party libraries are the largest sources of vulnerabilities in organizations today — Log4j being a prime example. The Log4j logging utility is used in countless applications, so the recently discovered flaw has created a security crisis of epic proportions. Corporate security should not assume that the unpaid volunteers who maintain open source libraries have performed thorough security testing as changes are made to the code. It is essential to have security tools in the DevSecOps pipeline that can analyze not only internal source code, but also the source code of third-party components.

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Implementing Automated Tools

In a DevSecOps pipeline, there is usually an artifact library with all of the code associated with a particular app or project. All of the resources the app depends on should be added to the artifact library. That will cause the artifact library to reach out to the source code for things like the operating system and other components as part of a live environment. This enables the DAST tools to find all sorts of vulnerabilities that developers wouldn't otherwise know are there.

At DeSeMa, we are experts at building CI/CD pipelines that include artifacts from third-party sources. We're also experts in tuning SAST- and DAST-based systems. We can map your environment and provide the context these tools need to provide more relevant and actionable information.

For example, if a component cannot be reached from the public Internet or can easily be hidden behind an API gateway, any alerts related to that code can be silenced. However, if you can’t control access to the application at that layer, you need to know if there are any vulnerabilities.

Many organizations want to incorporate security into their DevSecOps practices, but they lack the time, know-how, and cultural mindset. Development teams are focused on getting code released quickly, and security teams dedicate most of their resources to mitigating active threats. DeSeMa can help you implement automated tools that help you balance security and efficiency. Learn how by exploring our website and reaching out to our team of experts today!

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