In application development, and especially in DevSecOps environments, there is increased pressure for development teams to deliver applications more quickly. However, meeting the challenge of increasing productivity and accelerating development often comes at the cost of security.
To ensure that application development and more frequent deployments don’t decrease the security or increase the number of vulnerabilities in applications, DevSecOps teams need to implement automation tools and find ways to boost transparency within the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) at every step along the way.
But how do these teams ensure rapid continuous delivery of services remains visible, accountable to security standards and all the new versions are trackable?
At the recent Dynatrace Perform conference, Wolfgang Heider, Senior Technical Product Manager at Dynatrace, and Saif Gunja, Product Marketing Director, DevOps for Dynatrace, shared tips on how to use automation to boost productivity for DevSecOps teams, that may find calls to accelerate development frustrating without transitioning to a DevSecOps model. As Saif explained:
“…software development is getting more complex. IT teams are getting more frustrated with their traditional approaches, and this is really limiting their agility. IT wants to be more nimble, more dynamic, and the IT DevOps approach certainly helps [deliver] agility and flexibility.”
This is a problem that only compounds as software development teams introduce more effective, mission-critical applications. “The more successful you are with your software engineering business, with your software development, with continuous delivery…you speed up releases,” Wolfgang explained. “And the more releases you get, the more versions you get, the more you have a lack of visibility.”
Luckily, there are steps that application development teams can take to boost productivity, accelerate development and keep their software secure. Here are three steps the presenters shared for boosting productivity while infusing security throughout the SDLC:
- Maintain High-Fidelity Observability – This helps developers make better decisions and drive innovative application development without introducing risk along the way. Solving the problem of visibility at speed is key to more productivity and efficiency overall.
- Automate Manual Tasks and Problem Solving – Implement Service-Level Objectives (SLOs), loop remediation, and high-powered root cause analysis that allow monitoring of security across each new phase of development, and for security to be infused into the development process rather than be an added obstacle at the end.
- Provide a Coherent Development Platform – production environments need a single source of truth that allows them better collaboration where all the security, automation, and visibility are conveniently placed within a single solution.
Wolfgang confirms the value of a single platform, “This is what helps them deliver applications faster and helps them spend more time innovating rather than fixing.”
Ultimately, new applications and software solutions are only capable of improving operations and service within an agency if they’re secure. Otherwise, the value and productivity improvements they deliver are lost when vulnerabilities in the application are exploited for the next larger government cyberattack.
By embracing automated solutions for security testing and a single platform for development, application development teams can ensure the solutions they’re developing are secure and that security is baked into their applications at every step. They can also increase transparency across the entire SDLC that improves coordination and collaboration in the application development team and key stakeholders.
