Three Challenges That Prevent Successful DevSecOps Strategies and How to Solve Them

This article was authored and submitted by Mark Lambert, VP of Products at Parasoft. It was originally published on the company’s blog and available in its entirety HERE.

There’s no doubt that DevOps and security are top-of-mind for software organizations, and the result of integrating security into DevOps has been the introduction of the terms SecDevOps and DevSecOps. Although used interchangeably, the order of words is important. Why? Because in most cases, security is still being “tacked on” at the end of the deployment process.

As I discussed in my last post, most of the problems with DevSecOps today come back to organizations trying to “fix” security by adding testing at the end of the product cycle, hoping to catch some of the critical vulnerabilities. Shifting security to the left, as in SecDevOps, is the key to success.

Ultimately, security must be part of each developer’s day-to-day workflow and integrated into the software pipeline – and with very good reason. Here are three of the challenges that arise when an organization leaves security to the end of the development process, and how they can solve them with a smarter approach to security:

Challenge: Hard to know how to “fix” security
Most developers and testers are not security experts (yet), so it is a tall order to be told to “fix” security in the late stages of development when it’s unclear what to do.

Solution: Improve security gradually
Instead, teams can use centralized policies, like secure coding standards and static analysis checks for common vulnerabilities, to improve security gradually over the whole development lifecycle.

In addition, security tools can give developers and testers guidance on why vulnerabilities exist, how they are exploited, and ultimately, removed and tested.

Challenge: End-of-cycle security testing results in delays and vulnerabilities left in production
The common approach of attempting to shoe-horn security into an almost-complete product is insufficient. Too many vulnerabilities are making their way into production code.

Solution: Integrate security analysis into the earliest stages of development
Instead, security can be incorporated into day-to-day development and operations. Developers should be able to perform analysis directly inside the IDE, shifting security compliance to the very early stages of development.

Challenge: Unknown status of project security risk until the last moment
Lacking any sort of vulnerability assessment, projects have completely unknown security risks until some sort of testing is done.

When late-cycle testing is done, security vulnerabilities discovered tend to cause late-cycle churn and rework. Despite these heroic last-minute efforts, many security vulnerabilities still make it through into customers’ hands.

Solution: Ongoing monitoring of software quality and security
To enable prioritization and course correction, real-time compliance reporting should provide easy-to-access dashboards, with a top-level and deep-dive view of data.

To read Mark’s original article in its entirety, click HERE.