How DevOps Security Tools Support Modern Applications?

Modern application development organizations must integrate and automate DevOps security tools such as IAST into the CI/CD pipeline to speed up developers.

How DevOps security tools support modern applications

Software developers dedicated to modern applications have embraced agile development, DevOps security tools, and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) methods. As consumers and businesses increasingly rely on Web and mobile applications to meet their software needs, developers have to get rid of the monolithic local applications that rely on a " big bang" release, business logic and data layer, every 6 The major version will not be released until 24 months. Today's modern applications must be updated more frequently. It turns out that the best way to do this is to atomize the code base into modules or components, divided into proprietary code, open source, microservices, and APIs.

Modern applications need to be expanded to potentially millions of users worldwide, and their data capacity is EB level, and they are processed almost instantly, so they cannot be used in the overall software paradigm. When a developer can understand everything about the code base, the era of monolithic applications is over. As agile development and CI/CD pipelines increase the flexibility and automation of code creation and delivery, DevOps has also begun to automate security tools.

DevOps security tools

Consistent with the idea of modular or componentized modern applications, proponents of this idea do not want to move their entire code base into the cloud through an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platform like Alibaba Cloud Service. They want to be able to choose between the best technologies, including third-party DevOps security tools, and research shows that companies currently use only 15 of more than 150 cloud-native AWS services. Although standard Web applications can be used with off-the-shelf IaaS security tools, modern applications require more.

The analyst wrote in Gartner's "Key Functional Report for Application Security Testing": "Buyers usually look for a single vendor platform that includes static application security testing, dynamic application security testing, and other AST technologies. Web application testing may be sufficient, but modern applications and DevOps usually require point solutions, such as tools for API security testing."

Modern applications are developing rapidly

In the era of modern applications, software developers are changing with each passing day, and they can check in under DevOps, agile development, and CI/CD pipeline models every day or even every hour, which enables rapid development of software developers. However, in the modern application movement, there is an obstacle in the "continuous innovation" competition: unless the team seamlessly integrates DevOps security tools into their DevOps workflow, the rapid development and decentralization of the threat landscape and security Requirements may reduce the speed of delivery. The effectiveness of DevOps security tools depends on their ability to be automated and tightly integrated throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC).

According to Gartner’s report, “ DevOps and modern applications focus on rapid, iterative development styles, and are strongly influenced by how well tools integrate with the DevOps toolchain. The focus is on automation and creating an effective security footprint for developers to Minimize testing time."

DevOps, automation and IAST

Finally, whether you are deploying a monolithic application locally, a modern application using microservices in the cloud, or a hybrid combination of the two, DevOps cannot consider security. When DevOps security tools in the CI/CD pipeline are automated, potential security risks can be remedied even before being put into production. With proper DevOps security tool integration, teams can test code throughout the SDLC, which can deliver safe, high-quality software faster.

Modern application testing supports applications that make extensive use of open source components, APIs, client code, and JavaScript. The Gartner report states: "This category focuses on API security testing, software composition analysis (SCA), automation and turnaround, SDLC integration, and interactive application security testing (IAST), with SAST/DAST as a secondary consideration ."

Analysts in Gartner's "Key Function Report for Application Security Testing" wrote: "The person responsible for security and risk management for applications and security should effectively integrate with the integrated development environment to provide error tracking and improve quality. The solution, embedding AST in the software development lifecycle. Guaranteed, and supporting other application development and testing systems through plug-ins and full API support."

Seeker IAST is one of the DevOps security tools for modern applications. It is most suitable for automation and CI/CD pipeline processes, and is integrated with SAST, DAST and other application development and test systems (such as SCA). In fact, Synopsys scored the highest among the modern application use cases reported in DevOps and Gartner.