Introduction
DevSecOps is an essential and natural progression of how development companies handle security. Historically, security was 'tacked on to software towards the end of the development cycle (almost as an afterthought) by a dedicated security team and tested by a reliable quality assurance (QA) team. DevSecOps automatically incorporates security across the software development lifecycle, allowing secure software to be developed at the pace of Agile and DevOps.
When software upgrades were issued just once or twice a year, this was workable. However, when software engineers embraced Agile and DevOps methods, with the goal of shortening software development cycles to weeks or even days, the old 'tacked-on approach to security became an intolerable bottleneck.
DevSecOps—short for development, security, and operations—automates security integration across the software development lifecycle, from original design through integration, testing, deployment, and software delivery.
DevSecOps is a practice that seamlessly incorporates application and infrastructure security into Agile and DevOps processes and technologies. It addresses security concerns when they arise - which is when they are most accessible, quickest, and least costly to resolve (and before they are put into production). Additionally, DevSecOps shifts the duty for application and infrastructure security from a security team to a shared responsibility for the development, security, and IT operations teams. Automating the secure software supply without slowing down the software development cycle allows the DevSecOps slogan "software, safer, sooner."
One of the primary components of the DevSecOps concept is automation: as early and often as feasible, across the SDLC to ensure security is applied throughout the development life cycle, saving time and money and minimizing friction between security and development teams.
Adoption of DevSecOps
To adopt DevSecOps, teams should take the following steps:
- Integrate security throughout the software development lifecycle to reduce software code vulnerabilities.
- Ascertain that the whole DevOps team, including developers and operations, is accountable for adhering to security best practices.
- Integrate security controls, tools, and procedures into the DevOps workflow to enable automatic security checks at each step of software delivery.
- DevSecOps applies security to all phases of a standard DevOps pipeline: plan, code, build, test, release, and deploy.
Continuous delivery is a distinguishing feature of a DevOps workflow. Continuous integration, continuous delivery/deployment (CI/CD), continuous feedback, and continuous operations all fall under this category. Instead of doing one-time testing or scheduling deployments, each function is performed continuously.
Most Effective DevSecOps Tools
We've compiled a list of the best DevSecOps tools that companies can incorporate into their DevOps pipeline to guarantee security is managed constantly throughout the development lifecycle. The recommended list of DevSecOps tools are as follows:
Packagecloud
Packagecloud conducts vulnerability scans, supply chain poisoning analysis, and Trojan-horse analysis to ensure that the packages you use are secure. Additionally, Packagecloud checks your packages against all known cybersecurity risks, guaranteeing that nothing included inside them is insecure.
Packagecloud can centrally store all of your packages, giving you complete control over the ones you use. Instead of relying on public repositories, you can ensure that packages are constantly retrieved from a controlled environment.
You can utilize Packagecloud to ensure the complete security of your packages and software supply chain. In addition, you can check out the free trial Packagecloud is currently offering for users to benefit from their security services.
GitLab
GitLab is a cloud-based DevOps platform that includes an integrated CI/CD toolchain. It facilitates cooperation between Development, Security, and Operations teams and enables them to accelerate delivery and fix security risks without slowing down the CI/CD process by simplifying the toolchain.
Besides being named a continuous integration leader, GitLab provides a complete solution for organizations looking to reduce their DevOps cycle time by bridging silos and stages and enabling a unified workflow that streamlines previously separate activities such as application security and continuous integration/continuous delivery.
Logz.io
Logz.io is another business founded by engineers for engineers. The firm provides scalable cloud observability driven by ELK & Grafana, allowing developers to monitor, debug, and protect production quickly. Among the many beneficial features included in this log management and analysis system is security analytics that assists businesses of all sizes in addressing risks and remaining compliant.
With sophisticated threat detection and correlation, Logz.io's security analytics enables developers to incorporate security into their DevOps pipelines alongside the tools and data used for operations, allowing them to discover more threats without compromising speed or agility. Additionally, it incorporates data, regulations, and connectors that assist businesses in remaining compliant.
Contrast Security
This team provides companies with a Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) and an Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST) solution to assist them in developing self-protecting software. Contrast Security's solutions are fully integrated into users' applications and run in the background constantly. Contrast Assess, the initial component of the Contrast Security Suite, notifies developers when a vulnerability is identified.
The second component of the suite, Contrast Protect, utilizes the same embedded agent and operates in the production environment, searching for vulnerabilities and unknown threats and reporting what it discovers to a SIEM console, next-generation firewall, or any other security tools currently in place at the business. Additionally, Contrast Security has enhanced its outstanding service by introducing Contrast OSS, enabling companies to cover open source security with automated open source risk management.
SonarQube
SonarSource's open-source initiative focuses on assisting developers through automation. SonarQube is a code review tool that automatically detects flaws, vulnerabilities, and code sees in your code. It interacts with the natural processes of development teams to offer continuous code examination across all of their project branches and pull requests.
SonarQube supports almost 30 programming languages and provides:
- Continuous code inspection.
- Enabling small development teams and businesses to identify and repair bugs and vulnerabilities in their applications quickly.
- Preventing undefined behaviour from affecting end users.
Codacy
Codacy is a quality automation and standardization solution that enables development teams to move as far left as possible in the development process, detecting new problems early on. Their static code analysis tool allows developers to automatically detect and fix security vulnerabilities, duplication, complexity, style violations, and coverage gaps with each commit and pull request, straight from their Git workflow.
Codacy supports over 20 programming languages and fits seamlessly into developers' workflows, giving them insight into the quality of their code and monitoring the quality of their projects over time, allowing them to resolve any technical debt quickly.
Today's goal is to assist software development teams in making excellent engineering choices and increasing productivity via quality, and they seem to be succeeding. Codacy claims to save developers hundreds of hours in code review and quality monitoring, allowing them to concentrate on development while Codacy simplifies the process of developing high-quality software.
XebiaLabs
XebiaLabs has been present since the infancy of DevOps, assisting businesses in speeding up their releases and supporting the usually various infrastructure and complicated procedures of big organizations.
The XebiaLabs DevOps Platform provides a comprehensive Application Release Orchestration (ARO) solution encompassing all release orchestration aspects, including deployment automation and DevOps analytics. It is suitable for usage in almost any context, including containers, the cloud, middleware, and mainframes.
The platform integrates seamlessly into the DevOps pipeline. It unifies all of an organization's DevOps tools into a unified interface, enabling organizations to orchestrate and automate the entire software delivery and deployment process, including continuous integration, security, database management, analytics, environment provisioning, and issue tracking and reporting.
Acunetix
Acunetix provides an all-in-one website security analyzer to assist developers in identifying vulnerabilities early on. Acunetix's mission is to assist businesses with a significant online presence in protecting their high-risk web assets from hackers by offering specialized solutions that help developers detect and resolve more problems. Easy to use, the solution allows centralization, automation, and integration.
Acunetix is a powerful solution and one of the most established markets. It focuses only on online security and offers high-speed scanning, low false positives, simplicity of use, proprietary technology, and SDLC integration.
WhiteSource
Another risk category that many DevSecOps tools overlook is open source vulnerabilities. Given that the average application nowadays contains between 60% and 80% open source code, it is critical for companies not to overlook open-source security management and to have a dedicated solution that monitors and alerts users to open source vulnerabilities across the DevSecOps pipeline.
WhiteSource interacts with the DevOps pipeline and is compatible with more than 200 programming languages and a broad range of build tools and development environments. It operates in the background automatically and constantly, monitoring the security, licencing, and quality of open source components and cross-referencing them against WhiteSource's extensive database of open source repositories to offer real-time warnings, prioritization, and remediation.
Aqua Security
Aqua security is one of DevSecops tools that contributes to the success of the DevSecOps pipeline by ensuring container security. Aqua's cloud-native security technology enables customers to exert complete control over containerized systems at scale while maintaining runtime security controls and intrusion prevention capabilities.
The platform has an API that enables users to integrate and automate their processes easily. Aqua Container Security Platform offers end-to-end SDLC controls for protecting containerized applications that operate on-premises or in the cloud, on Windows or Linux. The platform is capable of orchestrating in a wide range of settings.
