Understating the concept of DevOps practices into InfoSec.

Over the years, security is always perceived as a technology problem, for delivering business excellence, instead of taking an inclusive approach to deal with the challenges. This means organizations need to develop a progressive security program to create the right framework that fits the business objective. In this way, bringing together security teams and DevOps gives a more collaborative real-time framework to accomplish time-to-market goals. 

Today, as organizations are increasingly employing the agile approach, leveraging DevOps provides ways to software development that accentuates collaboration between an organization's operations, development, testing, and support teams. DevOps provides security teams an opportunity to incorporate security earlier in the software development and deployment process. 

Integrating Security into DevOps

Traditionally, InfoSec teams viewed DevOps as a risk by, with its augmented velocity of software releases seen as a threat to governance and security and regulatory controls. However, enterprises employed DevOps have shown consistently that DevOps practices essentially ease potential security issues, detect issues faster and address them more quickly.

According to a Forbes article, there are some factors driving the urgency to integrate security into DevOps workflows. 

• Engineering, DevOps and security teams each have their own knowledge and skills and way of communicating reinforced by siloed systems. 
• Time-to-market and launch delays are common when engineering, DevOps and security don’t have a unified system to use that includes automation tools to help scale tasks and updates.
• Developers are doing Application Security Testing (AST) with tools that aren’t integrated into their daily development environments, making the process time-consuming and challenging to get done.
• Limiting security to the testing and deployment phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) is a bottleneck that jeopardizes the critical path, launch date and compliance of any new project.
• 70% of DevOps team members have not been trained on how to secure software adequately according to a DevSecOps Global Skills survey.

Bolstering Security with DevOps

DevOps offers an enormous opportunity for better security if employed right. Many of the DevOps practices, including automation, emphasis on testing, enhanced visibility, collaboration and consistent release practices, among others, are productive ground for integrating security and audit capability as a built-in component of a company’s DevOps processes. While stepping in to integrate security, the best way is to integrate from the early stages of DevOps processes, rather than as an afterthought at the very end of the software delivery pipeline.

The DevOps automation model spans the entire pipeline, from code development to testing and infrastructure configuration to deployment. In order to capitalize on the changes driven by DevOps, organizations to create an operating model that integrates business, operations and technology into a standalone framework for greater agility and market responsiveness. DevOps can also stimulate businesses’ lead time, so that they can develop, test, and deploy their patch or update more quickly.