DevOps practices have become popular in recent years. However, as organizations begin to incorporate its practices into their workflows and IT environments, they are starting to realize that security needs to be built into the process. This is where the term DevSecOps comes in.
What is DevOps?
DevOps brings together the concepts of development and operations, and the collaboration between the two.
DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: evolving and improving products at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organizations to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market. – AWS Definition
Communication, collaboration and integration are the three main principles of DevOps. For companies, DevOps adds value by increasing the quality and stability of software or applications and reducing development time. For developers, this practice is as much about automation as it is about culture – how work gets done.
In short, the DevOps area is responsible for monitoring, facilitating and automating code releases, ensuring faster delivery and code quality. To do so, they need a thorough understanding of the infrastructure and the software development lifecycle (SLDC).
What is DevSecOps?
According to a survey by the Enterprise Strategy Group, 48% of developers take vulnerable code to production due to time pressure. This is where the importance of including security in the development lifecycle comes in.
DevSecOps automates security integration at all stages of the software development lifecycle. It aims to strengthen security, including testing, scanning, monitoring and remediation, across the entire SDLC from planning, development, building, testing to release, deployment, ongoing operations and upgrades. DevSecOps is a culture, and it requires everyone involved in software development to take responsibility for security. All decisions must be made considering safety from the beginning. This culture helps reduce the costs of security and compliance and enables organizations to deliver secure software faster. Ideally, this is done without reducing developers’ agility or requiring them to move outside their development toolchain environment.
According to GitLabs’s Global Developer Report, mature teams in DevSecOps are able to identify vulnerabilities 3 times earlier and test at a level of 91% to 100% of code.
