Writing secure code is becoming a greater challenge every day. Even the largest multinational companies that attract the best developers from all around the world, face the same problem. They are suffering vulnerabilities in their code, from SQL Injection, Cross-Site Scripting, to backdoors.
Security is a broad field and one that is difficult to keep up with the constant advancements, in terms of threats and technology solutions. Take application security for example, where there are several tracks and specialisms. One way of keeping developers on top is by continuously addressing application security concerns in the SDLC process, resulting in a security-aware mindset in the development process.
The effects of integrating security too late, or as we have seen in some cases, not at all, in the SDLC, is a dangerous game to play, let alone an expensive one – whether fines and financial and reputational losses when breaches occur or being costlier to remediate vulnerabilities when they are discovered in production.
For applications to be designed and implemented with proper security requirements, secure coding practices and a focus on security risks must be integrated into day-to-day procedures and the SDLC. With the implementation of a standard set of secure coding practices, your organization will have a much easier time understanding the most common risks you deal with and learn the best ways to fix and prevent similar issues in the future.
Shifting Security Left
The general premise behind “Shift Left” is that we move things that we typically do in later stages earlier.
In the case of application security, this means implementing security testing while the application is being developed, rather than at the end of the process or worse still, a penetration test weeks or months later.
Security testing during the latter stages of the delivery pipeline is important too, ensuring you can detect all security flaws of your microservices as they interact with each other. You can read more about microservices security if in following whitepaper bellow.
The overall goal of a DevSecOps environment and a shift-left security process is to identify and resolve potential vulnerabilities earlier in the development life cycle when these issues are less expensive and quicker to fix. Doing so will help to mitigate the risk potential security concerns pose to both the delivery schedule and your end-users.
DevSecOps: Integrating Security Into the Development Process
For security teams to enable the DevOps process, collaboration is essential. Through this collaboration, the process of DevOps transforms into something known as DevSecOps.
The concept behind DevSecOps is to establish security testing earlier in the software development lifecycle, shifting testing to the left by addressing security planning, testing and monitoring into each phase of the DevOps pipeline.
Importantly, DevSecOps does not replace traditional security testing or secure software development practices — it merely complements them.
Automation is the key to the DevSecOps approach: as early and often as possible, ensuring security throughout the entire software development life cycle, saving both time and money, but without affecting the development velocity.
“With DevOps, you have to move super fast. There can be no ‘manual’ in that process. If you don’t have automation, you’ll never be successful.”— Chris Romeo
To see how Bright can help you Shift-left and deliver an immediate DevSecOps environment with integrated and automated AppSec testing, request our Demo or contact us today to discuss your requirements.
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