The speed and agility of DevOps delivers tremendous business benefits. But that velocity can also introduce vulnerabilities without controls in place. Here we explore how organizations can embed security into DevOps pipelines for cloud applications, creating a continuous “DevSecOps” practice.
The Risks of Speed Without Security
First, it’s important to understand security gaps that emerge from rapid cloud application development:
Introducing Vulnerabilities
The pressure to release features fast leads teams to focus mostly on functionality over rigorously following secure coding standards. This results in vulnerabilities being introduced.
Lack of Review
Code reviews and security scanning often get sidelined to meet release deadlines. Applications go to production with vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
Drifting Configurations
Infrastructure configurations tend to drift from approved baselines to accommodate shortcuts during development. Unapproved changes accumulate leading to insecure deployments.
Failure Interdependencies
Code across components become highly interdependent. A single vulnerability can cascade across many layers of an application and cloud environment. Outages spiral.
Detection Blindspots
With frequent changes, understanding what’s “normal” behavior becomes difficult. Anomaly detection tools are less effective. Breaches go unnoticed.
These risks expand exponentially in cloud environments given the scale and ubiquity of resources that can be easily provisioned.
Embracing “DevSecOps”
Addressing these risks requires tightly integrating security practices into DevOps pipelines. The combination of development, security, and operations is referred to as “DevSecOps.”
Here are key principles for making DevSecOps work:
Automate Scanning and Testing
Baked-in automation is essential for security to enable DevOps speed. Manual reviews, pen testing, and audits are too slow. Automated scanners and tests provide rapid feedback on vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.
Embrace Infrastructure-as-Code
Managing infrastructure through declarative configuration files checked into source control allows versioning of cloud environments alongside application code changes. IaC enables consistent, documented, and testable infrastructure changes.
Standardize Configurations
Reuse vetted infrastructure, container, logging, and policy configurations across environments instead of custom one-off settings. Standards prevent risky changes.
Integrate Security into CI/CD
Make security steps like secrets management, infrastructure scanning, license checks, and vulnerability testing integral parts of continuous integration and deployment pipelines. Fail builds if checks fail.
Provide Guardrails
Provide secure configurations, deployed controls policies, and standards as predefined pipelines, templates, modules and governance guardrails that teams can easily integrate rather than reinventing security.
Enforce Policy-as-Code
Express security policies, access controls, and compliance rules as testable and versioned code over manual controls. Changes trigger automated policy checks. Always keep policies and environments in sync.
By following these principles, security transforms from a slowing gate to an enabler of innovation speed through automation and integration.
Establishing a DevSecOps Pipeline
With guiding principles established, here is an example framework for a DevSecOps pipeline containing essential security steps:
1. Code
- Enforce secure coding best practices and standards compliance
- Perform automated scans for vulnerabilities during code commits
- Block check-ins of insecure code
- Ensure secrets and keys are securely stored and retrieved at runtime
2. Build
- Insert application security testing like SAST, DAST into build automation
- Block builds containing high/critical vulnerabilities
- Generate security metadata from pipelines like logs and test results
3. Infrastructure
- Scan IaC configuration files for security risks
- Enforce infrastructure compliance checks and risk analysis before deployment
- Manage infrastructure-as-code in version control alongside application code
4. Deploy
- Dynamically generate secure configurations tied to deployments
- Enforce that only validated artifacts from pipelines get deployed
- Integrate security info into application deployment logs
5. Operate
- Continuously scan production infrastructure and applications
- Feed telemetry data into analytics for threat detection
- Enable rapid emergency response and hot fixes outside pipelines when needed
6. Monitor
- Log monitoring, user activity tracking and alerting
- Dashboard visibility into end-to-end risk posture
- Traceability linking code versions to production assets
This pipeline catches risks early and often while providing visibility across the full application lifecycle.
Key Practices for Cloud DevSecOps
Applying DevSecOps principles in multi-cloud environments brings additional challenges. Here are key practices to enable secure and compliant cloud DevOps:
Centralize Policies Across Environments
Unified policy management and controls across on-prem, hybrid cloud, and multi-cloud environments prevents sprawl of fragmented tools and governance.
**Connect Disparate Data Sources **
Collect, normalize and correlate telemetry data from various clouds under common schemas and toolsets for centralized visibility and detection of risks.
Standardize Processes Across Teams
Standardize secure software factory specifications for infrastructure, deployment patterns, coding, testing, monitoring etc. across all cloud teams over disparate methods. Promote security automation reuse.
Tie Code to Production Identifiers
Maintain links between code versions, test cycles, and deployment artifacts like cloud region, host IDs, and instance ARNs for traceability across clouds.
Enforce Uniform Representations
Abstract policy, configuration and risk concepts into uniform representations that translate consistently across heterogeneous cloud platforms and infrastructure automation tools.
Employ Policy Guardrails
Provide pre-defined pipelines with embedded policies and controls as guardrails for teams to easily secure cloud deployments at scale vs. reinventing controls.
Accelerating Secure Innovation
With continuous security automation woven into the fabric of cloud DevOps, teams can prevent vulnerabilities from derailing innovation speed. Security transitions from being an afterthought to an enabler of agility, without sacrificing protection.
Adopting modern practices like policy-as-code, immutable infrastructure, and risk-based analytics transforms security into a driver of velocity over a roadblock. Security consciousness gets embedded across the delivery pipeline, resulting in inherently more secure cloud applications.
