DevOps, the word, is a combination of “development” and “operations”. It represents more than just a team or a process or an idea. DevOps is an organizational culture or practice aimed at rapidly and continuously delivering software to quickly iterate and incorporate changes.
The concept of DevOps is broad and must be implemented across several teams within an organization to achieve the desired results. The main goals are faster time to market, shortened release cycle and low rate of release failure.
Software security vulnerabilities are among the most commonly used weaknesses that hackers exploit to compromise business applications and steal data. Unfortunately, vulnerabilities at this level are also among the most difficult to fix because they require going back through development and making changes at the code level. The longer it takes organizations to identify software security vulnerabilities, the more money and time they end up spending to repair them, all while facing a greater risk of getting hacked.
As organizations increasingly embrace DevOps, they face new challenges for ensuring that all steps in their development process follow correct security procedures and that the software they produce is secure.
While DevOps offers the benefit of faster production timelines and continuous delivery, one challenge is that developers produce code faster and more often than security teams can keep up with. In a DevOps environment, security teams often have trouble retrofitting traditional security activities such as security requirements, threat modelling, static analysis and penetration testing.
Conversely, development teams are too time-constrained to waste time on inefficient security processes, such as triaging unmanageable volumes of results from application security testing tools.
DevSecOps (or Secure DevOps) aims to more efficiently bridge security with development. DevSecOps allows organizations to move fast and ensure a high level of security across their applications and operations. It is a set of practices that attempts to address these issues through two core principles: automation and education.
