DevOps Security: Challenges on the Road to DevSecOps

What is DevOps security?

DevOps security is the practice of integrating security into all stages of the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC). It requires collaboration between three key stakeholders:

• Developers, who are responsible for writing code that is as secure as possible.
• IT operations (ITOps) teams, who manage software in production and play an important role in detecting and responding to threats.
• Security teams, who take the lead in charting security strategies and providing guidance to help development and ITOps teams adhere to security best practices.

Because DevOps security depends on collaboration between these three groups – Developers (Dev), Security (Sec), and IT operations (Ops) – you may sometimes hear people use the term DevSecOps to refer to DevOps security.

In addition to bringing different groups of stakeholders together, DevOps security also emphasizes the importance of making security a deeply integrated part of the SDLC. Rather than performing securing checks independently of the SDLC – such as by running scans only just prior to deploying an application release into production – DevOps security encourages teams to scan code as soon as they write it, scan again once it’s compiled, scan again before deployment and then continue to monitor runtime environments for risks that may still exist post-deployment. 

DevOps security challenges

Although DevOps security can significantly boost the efficiency and effectiveness of security operations, it’s not without its challenges. Common difficulties and roadblocks include:

• Too many tools: The more tools teams use, the harder it becomes to move data efficiently between them and identify risks quickly. This is a challenge given that 57 percent of security teams use at least six different tools, according to GitLab’s 2023 Global DevSecOps Report. Consolidating tooling can improve DevOps security.
• Fast-moving processes: Organizations that practice DevOps typically use processes like Continuous Integration/Continuous Development (CI/CD), which creates constantly changing software delivery pipelines. With such a fast pace of change, it can be challenging to keep track of DevOps security risks and remediate them quickly, without delaying software delivery.
• Focus on fast application releases: Similarly, releasing applications quickly is often a key focus of DevOps. Security issues, however, can lead to release delays, especially if the issues are not discovered early enough to enable efficient resolution.
• Lack of effective engagement: It’s one thing to say that your development, ITOps, and security teams collaborate. It’s another to ensure they can actually communicate and work together efficiently.

DevOps security best practices

Practices like the following can help overcome the DevOps security challenges described above:

• Adopt a centralized DevOps security platform: Having a shared, centralized platform where all stakeholders can track DevOps security risks can help stakeholders collaborate efficiently. It also reduces the toil that engineers would face if they had to juggle a set of disparate DevOps security tools.
• Shift security “left”: Shifting security to the “left” means performing security scans and tests as early as possible within the SDLC. This is beneficial for DevOps security because the earlier you detect a risk, the faster and easier it typically is to fix it, and the lower the chance that you’ll have to delay an application release while you wait on a security remediation.
• Shift security “right”: Shifting security to the “right” by adding post-deployment tests and scans, after code has transitioned from the development phase to deployment, is equally important. Shifting right maximizes your ability to detect security risks that slipped past initial scans. Rather than waiting until the risks turn into an active threat, you can catch them through proactive post-deployment monitoring.
• Measure DevOps security’s impact: To measure the impact of DevOps security initiatives, track data like mean time to remediate risks and the number of vulnerabilities that enter production environments. Metrics like these are valuable because they allow you to track the success of your DevOps security practices over time. They also make it possible to quantify the impact of DevOps security, which can in turn increase buy-in and support for DevSecOps initiatives within the organization.

Why is DevOps security important?

DevOps security is important because it helps to integrate security into the software development process. By extension, it makes it easier to identify security risks proactively and to remediate them in an efficient way that minimizes disruption to the development lifecycle.

As noted above, the core focus of DevOps doesn’t extend to security. When the DevOps concept appeared in the late 2000s, the main goal behind the DevOps philosophy was to make software delivery more efficient by ensuring that development and ITOps teams worked together efficiently.

As a result, organizations that adopt DevOps don’t necessarily embed security into their software delivery practices. Instead, they may treat security as a separate discipline, with the result that security teams aren’t able to work efficiently with developers and ITOps engineers. As of 2023, 17 percent of organizations say their security operations remain siloed from DevOps, according to Red Hat.

The separation between security and DevOps can heighten security risks and increase reaction time. Developers might not find out quickly about a major new vulnerability that the security team has discovered, for example, and suspicious activity that the ITOps team discovers while managing a production application might not be reported immediately to the security team. DevOps security, however, closes this gap by making the security team a key stakeholder in the software delivery process.

In addition, poor integration of security into the DevOps lifecycle makes remediation less efficient. If you don’t detect a security risk until just before deploying an app, you’ll typically have to update the app’s source code, rebuild it, and run all of your tests again before you get back to the deployment stage of the SDLC. But by integrating security across the SDLC, DevOps security helps teams find and fix risks early, when the necessary changes tend to be less extensive.

Aqua’s DevOps security tools

The Aqua platform makes it easy to bake security into DevOps. With a variety of DevSecOps automations – such as collaborative remediation that brings diverse stakeholders together to fix DevOps security issues efficiently, and the integration of security scans into a variety of popular CI/CD software suites – Aqua allows organizations to prioritize security at all stages of the SDLC, while simultaneously keeping pace with fast-moving DevOps pipelines.