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The CISO guide to DevSecOps tactics and tools

How to embed sustainable security tools and tactics in your organization

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Build secure applications with DevSecOps

DevSecOps, in practice, emphasizes the cultural change towards a shared responsibility for security and employs tooling to automate security testing. The implementation extends a conventional DevOps pipeline with security-specific steps and adds an infrastructure scan pipeline. It’s important to realize that any security-related activities that are not included in the pipeline (e.g., threat modeling) must be performed separately on a regular basis.

As your organization embarks on its security automation journey, insist on abiding by these best practices:

  • Employing pre-commit hooks reduces the risk of accidentally storing sensitive data in version control systems.

  • Continuous software composition analysis reduce the risk of exposure to security vulnerabilities when using third-party libraries.

  • Static application security testing often detects the most common security issues by performing code analysis.

  • Dynamic application security testing mimics the hacker approach for attacking the running software in its execution environment.

  • Analysis of infrastructure code detects infrastructure-specific security issues before they can arise in the actual environment.

  • Infrastructure testing ensures that the running infrastructure is configured properly and meets the imposed compliance requirements.

  • All the reported security issues are present within the vulnerability management system. Staff can use that information to learn the overall security status, prioritize the remediation of the issues, and track historical data.

Any movements to expand automation should consist of small, measurable projects. Success in these projects can be scaled and optimized to improve various other processes throughout the organization. As the drive for automation widens across business and IT operations, organizations that employ DevSecOps tools and practices can build a powerful foundation for digital transformation, modernizing applications, and maximizing efficiency in software development.