With the help of cloud services, enterprises can obtain many advantages such as flexibility, scalability, and ease of use at the operational and management levels.
In addition, cloud services also enable IT teams to achieve rapid delivery of applications and functions through a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) approach. In order to give full play to the functional characteristics of cloud services, many organizations are currently striving to turn to DevOps, a new development and delivery concept.
Speed is one of the most important components of DevOps. It enables organizations to better respond to customer and market needs while continuously providing innovative output. With DevOps as an important homework, organizations will be able to more easily implement the iteration and deployment of new features and fixes, and quickly deliver them to users.
Although DevOps emphasizes speed, it also attaches great importance to security. Of course, it must be admitted that the rapid increase in speed will indeed have a negative impact on the entire organization's adherence to strict security status in the cloud environment.
This requires us to combine DevOps with security requirements (SecOps). Although the two can coexist at present, there is indeed a certain degree of tension, even conflict.
However, the confrontation between security and DevOps is not necessarily a zero-sum game. In fact, what we need is an effective method that can combine rapid CI/CD requirements with cloud security controls and policies to efficiently run data and resources while ensuring safe and reliable business processes.
The following three key practices play a vital role in the integration of
DevOps and SecOps processes and even the way of thinking:
1. Embed security into the development process
Some organizations take a pre-defined security approach; they treat security matters as a series of items on the to-do list, thereby regularly reviewing errors and vulnerabilities. For modern enterprises using cloud services, this old practice may not be able to keep up with the emergence of new vulnerabilities in a timely manner.
Therefore, we must bring security work to the organizational culture and view it as a necessary part of the entire IT, product, and engineering processes.
In addition to adopting
security control best practices at the code and resource levels, each team must also build an automatic security inspection mechanism in the system's production and operating environment.
In addition, it should be emphasized that even if the security issues of applications and systems are fully considered at the beginning of the design, and the appropriate security assessment is implemented throughout the development process, we may still encounter unplanned configuration changes, which may lead to failure Identify important safety incidents in time.
In order to ensure safety, enterprises must conduct continuous safety and compliance monitoring of production systems.
2. Introduce the automation mechanism into the security system
The existence of DevOps can greatly improve production efficiency; on the other hand, strict adherence to safety principles will greatly affect the level of production efficiency.
With the rapid advancement of cloud deployment and application development, application functions, configurations, and workloads continue to change every day, which means that it is impossible for us to adopt appropriate security adjustments in a timely manner manually.
Therefore, it becomes very necessary to fully introduce the automation mechanism into the security system. Most developers are already familiar with automation concepts such as scripting, coding, and complexity simplification. In fact, security guarantees in cloud environments can also be achieved in the same way.
The security function is different from the code, and the management of its processes can be performed through scripts and API access, rather than relying on a specific tool set.
At present, the cloud environment is continuously using the microservice architecture and DevOps to support the development and deployment process, so many tasks in security affairs have also gained programmability.
We can easily adjust the integration and deployment pipeline, and make full use of automated quality assurance and safety control mechanisms to support existing development workflows.
In addition, as more resources are added to the cloud environment, and more connection factors are integrated into the application, we should also use
automated solutions to continuously observe the settings, policies, controls, signatures, and other elements that directly affect the organization’s security posture, and at the same time Test and repair.
3. Reach a consensus
To integrate DevOps with security work, the related teams must undergo a far-reaching cultural change; we must guide both parties to integrate with each other and continue to maintain the independence and enthusiasm of their respective teams while collaborating.
Our goal should be to implement security controls and best practices at all levels of developers, operations teams, IT managers, QA and security, development and management, while continuing to respect the goals of rapid development, deployment and iteration.
Only when different groups understand each other's goals can they support their own and even each other's workflow from their own perspective.
This may sound simple, but it turns out that the success of a business depends on empathy and smooth communication between the participating parties. This also requires us to establish an effective communication and agile work environment, so that each team can continue to improve existing processes and operating methods.
In addition, we should consider using the right incentives and KPIs to provide incentives to different groups to guide them to recognize and support this new
DevOps/security operations integration method.
From a design perspective, cloud environments naturally have dynamic attributes. But under the variety of workloads, dazzling connection arrays, and increasing surface area, the cloud environment has always adhered to the same goal-to help code development and provide security.
Radical timetables and deadlines often force employees to ignore security discipline, and in a fully connected and rapidly changing cloud environment, security breaches will become a fatal weakness that companies cannot afford. Therefore, to achieve business success, companies must establish good processes and technical systems to effectively protect various key assets and data.
