In a fast-paced, competitive tech market, business leaders need to adopt the methodologies, processes, and technologies that allow them to minimize risk and maximize productivity.
DevOps, while not a new approach, has always seemed capable of withstanding the test of time, pushing dev teams forward, and helping businesses meet their goals. That’s why today we’ll be focusing on the DevOps methodology.
However, we’ll be addressing a common yet serious concern among companies that are thinking of implementing DevOps-how to do it with security in mind.
Let’s break this down and take a look at how you can securely integrate DevOps into your business, while leveraging training, talent, and technology.
It All Starts with Security-Focused Education
First and foremost, any new methodology, technology, or process that comes into your company needs to be preceded by thorough security training. In the case of DevOps implementation, this means educating and training your employees on DevOps-specific security and the potential threats that people need to consider.
Keep in mind that every methodology like this can come with its security risks, so prior to implementation, you need to have education.
Maintaining cybersecurity awareness is essential when introducing new methodologies, including those involving automation and software like DevOps, to address the security requirements your workforce must meet.
One of the best ways to get started with security training for your employees is to bring in consulting DevOps experts to organize workshops and in-house seminars. Keep in mind that security training is important for all members of your organization, not just your developers.
This will also set the stage for DevOps implementation with your existing dev team, and it will align devs with operations and other teams on security and DevOps practices.
Security in Every Stage of a DevOps Project
The DevOps methodology brings efficiency, continuous improvement, and automation to your projects, teams, and the organization as a whole. In order to bring amazing solutions to market that will meet your key performance indicators (KPIs), you need to follow the different DevOps lifecycle stages:
- Plan
- Code
- Build
- Test
- Release
- Deploy
- Operate
- Monitoring and feedback
Throughout this lifecycle, your developers and security experts need to prioritize data integrity, access management, early warnings and alerts, and other security features. These features will ensure that the code is safe, the information is kept secure, and that the project flows more efficiently across its stages.
Security should be your top priority when you need to manage your project pipeline across multiple DevOps projects as well, which will prove crucial if the devs are reusing data and code. Cross-project data management can be a tricky problem if you don’t have comprehensive security measures in place.
Always integrate security measures at every stage of the life cycle, especially for Deployment and Monitoring. The stages when your product hits the market can be the most challenging for security.
Getting Rid of DevOps Bottlenecks
Efficiency and continuous, incremental progress are at the core of the DevOps methodology.
But that doesn’t mean that DevOps, like any other methodology, can’t suffer from bottlenecks in any of its stages. The key is not to try to prevent bottlenecks altogether, it’s to also respond to inefficiencies and fix them quickly.
Continuous and comprehensive project monitoring will be the key here, so it’s important that your DevOps dashboard allows your devs and your operations officers to act. Real-time project monitoring (that delegated access accordingly) allows operations managers to act on alarms while the devs are able to delve into different project aspects.
Any of the project aspects, from the code to the testing and even client-facing data, can be the source of the bottleneck. That’s why technology plays such an important role here because you need a dashboard that will give you a comprehensive, real-time overview of all your projects.
But when you have a centralized platform, one with multi-tool integrations, you always have to think about security.
No matter the dashboard you’re using, make sure that it has a security-focused architecture, along with the security features we mentioned earlier to keep your projects safe.
Leveraging Security Unification
Security unification means that you’re bringing together all your security systems, providers, and processes into an all-encompassing solution. This is often easier said than done, but DevOps makes it easy and straightforward with its clear security protocols and processes.
Security unification is a viable tool for small teams, but it truly shows its potential when you have to secure enterprise data and projects that contain multiple datasets and sensitive information, and have multiple potential security concerns. Unification needs to leverage the right tech, but it also needs to focus on policy and compliance.
Make sure that the solution you’re using for security and data unification has the highest industry certifications while enforcing security policies that benefit you and your team. This should also include secure application programming interfaces (APIs) and more secure development through various integrated tools, in a fully impenetrable ecosystem.
DevOps as a methodology puts a great emphasis on security, so it’s important that data unification leverages data masking, code signing, confidentiality, access management, and more. Many security features come into play here, and serious dev teams need to make the most of them in order to keep large DevOps projects safe across the lifecycle.
Monitoring and Responding to Incidents
When implementing DevOps into your operations, you have to keep in mind that you can’t effectively prevent security risks, probing attacks, or even setbacks, at least not 100% of the time.
You need to couple prevention with real-time security management, which includes various types of incidents. When it comes to DevOps incident management and shortening your response times, you need to have a way to reach your on-call responders quickly.
Firstly, however, make sure that your DevOps system is able to recognize issues quickly, but also spot potential problems ahead of time. Smart solutions will enable teams to look for threats and issues proactively by continuously scanning the system and the data.
Once the issue is detected, you should have a tool that can quickly ping your on-call staff via multiple channels. You can ping them via email or SMS, or you can call them directly if the matter escalates.
The key is to act fast, so you should automate your system to send the right alerts to the right people, to ensure that all problems are resolved as quickly as possible.
Ensuring High Cloud Security
You can choose to run your DevOps solutions, tools, and your entire operation on-site or in the cloud. You can also have a hybrid between the two, where some resources are handled on on-site servers while some applications are cloud-based.
It will depend on your budget and resources, and your preferences. On-site solutions can give you more hands-on control, but there is no denying that cloud security has become the prevalent choice for businesses of all sizes over the years.
This is not just because cloud computing is more financially accessible, but because providers with a security-first focus are always bringing new security solutions to their customers. That means that you don’t have to worry about security, as your provider is taking care of it for you.
When you’re operating in the cloud, your focus should be on getting the latest security features from your provider, but you also need to have a dedicated security expert on staff.
Use Your DevOps Experts for Sales and Marketing
Last but not least, always keep in mind that your DevOps experts are valuable assets in more ways than one.
Aside from their expertise in the development sphere, they can be very useful for your marketing and sales campaigns. This can be especially useful when you’re trying to convince prospects to buy your software.
The content they create also falls under user-generated content, and it can do wonders for word of mouth and building social proof. In fact, according to the latest user generated content statistics (UGC), 92% of consumers say they trust UGC more than traditional ads, which is your opportunity to leverage in-house talent for success.
You can interview them and extract security-focused quotes, as well as important aspects of your software without uncovering any sensitive data or details. This way, you can create in-house UGC, but you can also instruct them to post their thoughts on their own social and networking channels.
Make sure to carefully curate this process to ensure no sensitive data is leaked, but use their expertise to elevate your brand and products in the online world.
Over to You
Over the years, the DevOps methodology has evolved with the industry trends and the needs of developers to improve efficiency, minimize risks, and protect their work against security threats.
Now more than ever before, it’s important to take a holistic approach to DevOps implementation in order to capitalize on its potential while keeping your work safe, as well as your brand. Be sure to use these tips to safely implement DevOps in your organization and empower your teams to achieve better results in 2024.
The post How to Implement DevOps Best Practices in a Secure Way appeared first on Datafloq.
