What is the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps?

DevOps and DevSecOps are two approaches for application development that may appear quite similar, but there is a significant distinction between them. What is the precise distinction between DevOps and DevSecOps? How they affect IT, efficiency, and business performance relies on your team’s objectives; thus, which strategy is best for your organization?

Some individuals may view the distinction between DevOps and DevSecOps as trivial. However, this is not the case, as teams that understand how to differentiate between these two approaches will have a better understanding of when it’s time to make key decisions to increase efficiency within their app development pipeline while also assisting in the transformation of current processes into those that emphasize speed, agility, and security.

What exactly does DevOps mean?

DevOps is a process aimed at increasing the rate at which software can be developed and enhanced by utilizing continual communication, automation, integration, and intelligence.

By stressing DevOps principles throughout a development cycle, developers will have better control over product infrastructure and will be able to prioritize software performance above other goals.

DevOps objectives are to:

• Boost the velocity of software delivery by allowing automation and collaboration.
• Gain greater command over production infrastructure
• Prioritize reliable and effective software delivery
• Streamline the incorporation of different software architectures and systems into the present and future products.

All of these objectives are crucially important for any developer or IT company.

Any IT company must be able to release high-quality goods and software updates on time and without continual disruptions or delays. DevOps enables developers to concentrate on approaches or systems that enable them to fulfil deadlines more often and reliably.

What is SecOps?

Like its cousin, “SecOps” combines two distinct concepts into a single shortened acronym. As you undoubtedly figured, “Sec” stands for cybersecurity.

Ops returns from the previous subject to refer to the operations or services of information technology. Therefore, “SecOps” refers to the emphasis on or approach for processes that enhance security during the development pipeline.

The objectives of SecOps are:

• To boost security by emphasizing cybersecurity at any development phase.
• To maintain security as a continually developing and adapting dynamic process.
• This allocates security responsibilities to stakeholders engaged in generating and safeguarding a specific application.

SecOps is more concerned with security than DevOps is with creating and constantly producing software and the development lifecycle.

Both techniques are necessary for top-tier IT organizations in the present day, especially given that cybersecurity is a very severe worry for all Enterprises.

What is DevSecOps?

This gets us finally to DevSecOps. If you’ve been paying attention, you can probably guess what this acronym represents and alludes to.

• Dev = software development pipeline and process focus
• Sec = software security and adaptation focus
• Ops = software operation and services focus

DevSecOps is essentially a mix of DevOps and SecOps, combining the two techniques to create a cyclical system that integrates information and practices from software development, cybersecurity, and technology operations.

DevSecOps’s objectives are to:

• Facilitate the rapid creation of reliable codebases and applications
• Align the prioritizing of development endeavours with security.
• Encourage the use of a flexible framework and growth processes.
• Ensure that security and development teams can collaborate and constantly improve

DevSecOps, like DevOps, contains numerous essential components that are useful to understand. Here is a basic summary.

Because DevSecOps stresses automated development processes and combines them with automated security measures, the goal of this methodology is quite obvious.

DevSecOps entails implementing security policies early in the software development lifecycle and automating such procedures to the greatest extent possible.

By automating, standardizing, and moving your security processes to the left, you will reap the benefits of far more agile development methods and combine the advantages of the methodologies above.

Security Moves Leftward

In the language of IT security, pushing your security duties to the left signifies transferring them to earlier phases of the development cycle.

By moving security to an earlier position in the development pipeline, security processes and procedures will be adopted before the application or software is too far along in development to be adequately secured.

By adhering to this technique and mindset, application development cycles may only continue when codebases have been validated as securely as possible.

In essence, this protects IT organizations from encountering embarrassing security breaches or difficulties further down the development pipeline due to something that might have been discovered sooner.

Continual Feedback Loops

Additionally essential is the emphasis on continuous feedback loops.

By integrating these feedback loops, all development team members, including those responsible for raw development, security, and operations, will be instantly updated on new features, policies, and development procedures.

In addition, continuous feedback guarantees that any automated processes may continuously monitor the program for alerts or security vulnerabilities. When applying this process, real-time alerts or difficulties with the code base as it is being compiled are feasible and common.

This is one of the major factors differentiating functioning DevSecOps teams from others since it prioritizes cooperation and teamwork above all else.

Automated Security

DevSecOps models and pipelines must also include automated security as a vital component for continued operation. By automating security, you reduce the likelihood of human mistakes and guarantee that security requirements are maintained with more rigour and dependability.

In addition, by automating a number of your security procedures or standards, your DevSecOps teams can perform greater tasks in less time. This is a fantastic approach to saving expenses and maximizing available personnel.

Read more: Top 10 DevOps Trends to Watch 2022

DevSecOps Types

Additionally, there are two sorts of DevSecOps to consider.

Security as Code (SaC)

The primary objective of SaC approaches is to integrate security procedures into conventional DevOps principles, practices, and automated technologies. This is exemplified by performing fundamental infrastructure modifications and quickly testing for defects or security flaws.

This is entirely doable if the DevOps team is aware of and on board with these secure coding techniques. It simplifies and increases the efficiency of testing.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

DevOps approaches and methodologies also incorporate IaC. Thanks to virtualization and cloud computing, an increasing number of businesses may make use of software infrastructure managed services.

If you manage your infrastructure using configuration files based on code, you may frequently remove the complexity that conceals security vulnerabilities, making DevSecOps more feasible across the board.

Advantages of DevSecOps

Why should your team transition to DevSecOps practices? There are several possible benefits that you may observe immediately after making the transition.

Cost Cutback

By incorporating security early in their development cycles, many firms and enterprises can save money.

This makes sense; by identifying security concerns early in the development lifecycle, you’ll be able to implement fixes more quickly and with less effort. You won’t need to install costly security patches later on.

This is especially true regarding ensuring legal compliance regarding consumer safety.

For example, GDPR penalties can equal up to 4% of a company’s yearly earnings. The simplest approach to prevent paying this cost is to ensure that you do not release an application with a clear security flaw.

Automated Security

By shifting security to the left of the DevSecOps pipeline, developers will more often than not benefit from automated security. This also benefits organizations and enterprises since it frees up personnel and enables smaller IT security teams to do more with fewer resources.

Improved Knowledge of the Application

This slight advantage is nonetheless essential. As DevSecOps integrates security into ordinary DevOps procedures, average developers will eventually become more familiar with security principles and generate more secure code by default.

Undoubtedly, integrating DevSecOps standards and practices causes some growing pains, but the potential benefits are well worth the effort.

What Do DevOps vs DevSecOps Have in Common?

One method for comparing DevSecOps with DevOps is to examine the fundamental components they share.

Collaborative Society

Collaboration is crucial to DevOps and security teams’ operations to fulfil development goals such as quick iteration and deployment that does not compromise privacy. Multiple teams are brought together in both approaches. Throughout the lifespan planning of an application, they all collaborate to provide effective outcomes.

Automation

Both DevOps and DevSecOps can automate app development processes using AI. This is accomplished for DevOps using technologies like code completion and anomaly detection. In the context of DevSecOps, automated and continuous security checks and anomaly detection can aid in proactively identifying high-risk vulnerabilities and security threats, especially in complicated and temporary settings. This is especially important when apps operate on dispersed, multi-cloud infrastructures and the IT perimeter extends to include identities.

Active Monitoring

DevOps and DevSecOps place a high value on data monitoring for learning and adapting. A crucial component of each approach is the continuous collection and analysis of application data to drive enhancements. Access to real-time data is crucial for optimizing the application’s performance, lowering the attack surface, and enhancing the organization’s overall security posture.

The Difference Between DevOps and DevSecOps

DevOps aims to provide a quicker and more efficient software deployment procedure. They do this by collaborating with the development and operations teams on shared KPIs (key performance indicators) so that each team knows where it requires input to complete the task without disputes or errors. A good strategy includes automated technologies that enable DevOps engineers to release changes as soon as feasible while maintaining predictability in the end-user experience. DevOps teams don’t always prioritize the prevention of security risks along the process, which can result in the accumulation of vulnerabilities that endanger the application, data, and other corporate assets.

The DevSecOps methodology departs from the usual “development and operations” strategy. Instead, security is considered far earlier in each project’s lifecycle, even before any code is created. With this innovative process for designing software, which integrates application assurance into every phase from planning to deployment, engineers can ensure that applications stay secure during delivery, allowing users to have a safe experience anytime they employ them. This strategy implements application security at the beginning of the build process rather than after the development pipeline. With this new approach, a DevSecOps engineer attempts to guarantee that apps are safe against threats before they are released to production and remain secure during app upgrades. DevSecOps stresses that developers should write code with security in mind and tries to resolve the security challenges that DevOps does not address.

DevSecOps extends the DevOps ecosystem with code analysis, compliance monitoring, threat investigation, and vulnerability assessments, among other capabilities. Incorporating such security standards into an agile framework ensures that the codebase is secure through constant testing and assessment.

Which Activities Differentiate DevSecOps from DevOps?

DevOps created the door for a new ecosystem of development and operations teams collaborating for a proactive SDLC. At the same time, Waterfall and Agile approaches were linear and mapped project activities into separate sequential stages.

DevOps framework is an enhancement to the SDLC by including methods such as:

• Continuous integration (CI) combines code modifications to guarantee that developers can access the most recent version.
• Continuous delivery and deployment (CD) – automates the process of providing updates to boost productivity.
• Microservices – constructs an application from a collection of smaller services.
• Infrastructure as code (IaC) – planning, implementing, and maintaining the infrastructure requirements of an application using code

Here’s how it operates:

• Developers develop the code and use version control to monitor any modifications.
• New code is included during the build step.
• Compilation and feedback from all code branches are obtained.
• Code for software reaches the deployment phase.

If all conditions are met, the code is released to production.

If errors are discovered, the developers correct the code, and the same procedures are repeated.

Each participant is accountable for the overall success of the software delivery procedure.

In contrast, the DevSecOps methodology covers the techniques mentioned above in addition to:

• Enumeration of common weaknesses (CWE) – improves code quality and boosts security during the CI and CD phases.
• Threat modelling – incorporates security testing into the development process to save future costs and time.
• Automated security testing – regularly test for vulnerabilities in new releases.
• Incident response management – establishes a standardized response structure for security issues.

Read more: DevOps and Agile: How to Agile & DevOps Interrelated

How to Convert from DevOps to DevSecOps

Here are five measures that each business may take to increase the security of its operations.

1. Collaborate with Developers to Tackle Security

Too frequently, developers regard security as an obstacle, especially if they enter the process too late. Before making changes to your process, getting teams on board with the DevSecOps philosophy is essential. Ensure that everyone understands the requirement and advantages of protecting apps early on and how this impacts your application development. Developers may not completely comprehend the unique security requirements and methodologies and believe they can manage it themselves.

2. Manage a Shift Left

The concept of “shift-left,” in which the responsibility for designing and implementing security is moved as early as feasible in the software development and system design process, has shown to be a significant contributor to security improvement. In addition, fixing issues in this manner ensures they are resolved permanently.

3. Select the Appropriate Combination of Security Testing Methods

Several security testing methods are available, and it can be difficult to determine which ones are ideal for your firm. Once you have determined how you wish to test security, you should locate the appropriate tools for enforcing security.

4. Develop coding standards for your group

In DevSecOps, evaluating the quality of your code is a vital component. Your team will have an easier job safeguarding your code in the future if you ensure that it is robust and standardized. If you haven’t previously, establish a mechanism for teaching developers coding best practices and guarantee that code changes can be executed without interruption.

5. Secure applications from the inside out

Protect apps that operate in the public cloud from the inside out, rather than attempting to protect the perimeter’s expansion. This makes an internal security strategy considerably simpler for IT staff and thus increases your security posture.

Who Does the Security for DevSecOps Policies?

Does this imply that developers must become security professionals? not even close. Most IT professionals know that the bulk of competent workers is experts to some degree.

This means that IT developers will not necessarily require a comprehensive understanding of security procedures or be specialists in applying security measures.

Instead, most DevSecOps teams that adhere to these approaches will form a specialized team of security-focused IT or QA specialists. This smaller team’s responsibility is to identify vulnerabilities or potential entry points in a specific program.

After discovering these vulnerabilities, they may submit them to the development team, allowing the development team to patch the metaphorical holes before they become a genuine problem.

DevSecOps Methodologies Difficulties and Solutions

This causes numerous issues, especially in the field of communication.

It is easy for friction to arise between the development and security teams.

Especially if the development staff isn’t adequately taught or isn’t prepared to prioritize security over pure functionality or usability.

Implementing DevSecOps policies holistically is the best method for addressing these problems.

By incorporating security into the company- or enterprise-wide development standards and keeping the development team in the loop, managers may reduce friction between development and security teams and ensure that everyone knows the mission’s broad objectives and risks.

Here are several examples:

• IT administrators can devise policies to eradicate bad coding practices.
• Managers can also highlight security automation standards and practices.
• Presenting and maintaining stringent security and quality requirements will go a long way toward reducing the number of accidental security problems introduced by developers over time.

Future Integration of DevOps and DevSecOps

As DevOps progresses and transitions into DevSecOps, we should observe coding standards, security, library protocols, and legislative protocol upgrades of equal importance.

According to a recent Gartner estimate, by 2023, 80% of firms that fail to adopt a contemporary security strategy would incur higher operational expenses and have a slower reaction time to assaults. Companies that cannot keep up with new security solutions are lagging.

As automation technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence, continue to improve, we will observe a shift in operations, which may involve the introduction of new frameworks. The future of DevSecOps promises that cooperation will achieve new heights of IT deployment automation, monitoring, and speed. Organizations cannot afford to treat security as an afterthought, so it is crucial to incorporate DevSecOps techniques into app development immediately.

Conclusion

Should you adopt DevSecOps procedures? Our view is that there is no reason not to. Even organizations that do not currently have distinct IT security teams might establish one to implement a number of the strategies mentioned above and policies.

DevSecOps may invariably improve the security and dependability of your software production operations without significantly extending the development lifecycle or straining corporate resources.

When you consider all the benefits and see how DevSecOps enhances the standard DevOps methodology, it is clear that DevSecOps is a must.