What is DevOps?

"Dev" in DevOps stands for development and "Ops" for Operations. DevOps integrates the developers and operations team to improve productivity and to enhance customer satisfaction. DevOps is a collaboration of development and operations team and is defined as, "a new philosophy that can help the software organizations innovate faster and responsive to the business needs."

DevOps team undertakes measures to automate everything from code testing to how provisioning can be made to the infrastructure. The integration, testing, monitoring and deployment often would be time-consuming in the traditional way. To add to that, the demands of the users have increased as well. With DevOps, the team focuses on adopting practices that improve the collaboration between departments such as development and testing, thus making the process of Software Development Life cycle (SDLC) easy. This is helpful for improving deployment frequency and the time to deploy new codes as well.

Adopting DevOps helps improve the code quality & operational efficiency. By maintaining an identical development and production environment,  DevOps adoption helps faster delivery of products with maximum software quality. The DevOps team writes the codes for configuration management to describe how the things should be built rather than building software and infrastructure manually. To manage and document the changes of codes for application and configuration, DevOps make use of a source control system.

HashRoot offers DevOps services to organizations and help streamline the software delivery process. Get in touch with us to know more.

Core Benefits of DevOps

  • High speed software delivery
  • Automated infrastructure
  • Automated workflows
  • Continuously measures application performance
  • Ability to respond fast to market needs

But Where Does DevOps Lack?

Automating the software development life cycle (SDLC) process helps organizations in quick software issue resolution and the ability to respond to market demands faster. Even though DevOps applications have gained wide popularity in the market due to their functionality, speed, and scalability features, they still lack in terms of security and compliance. Before and during the time of DevOps, the security checks came in the late stages of SDLC.

Before and during the time of DevOps, the security checks came in the late stages of SDLC. Finding and solving the security errors is a rework and time-consuming process for both developments as well as operations teams.

To overcome this drawback, DevSecOps was introduced into the SDLC. Instead of just bringing the development and operations together, DevSecOps in short brings together development, operations, and security by introducing security earlier in the software development life cycle process.

Why is DevSecOps Important?

DevSecOps works on the same principle of DevOps, however, the focus is also given to monitoring the product security from the very beginning of the SDLC process. And that is how DevOps and DevSecOps differ.

There are three terminologies, i.e, DevSecOps, SecDevOps, DevOpsSec and it is mainly regarding the priority in which security is integrated into the cycle. As long as security is implemented throughout the SDLC, it really doesn't matter which terminologies we use.

Benefits of DevSecOps

Here are some of the benefits of DevSecOps adoption.

DevSecOps has the ability to monitor the security in an automated monitoring.

  • Cost and Time Saving
    Detecting vulnerabilities and issues in the initial stage itself opens up the possibility to assess the risk and get it resolved immediately instead of waiting until the release. This would help save a lot on resource management costs and the man-hours spent on fixing the issue.
  • Early Detection of Vulnerabilities and Bugs
    Software package security vulnerabilities may arise at any stage, even if the developers carry out the basic-level security checks. Considering the fact that the process is huge, you need to have a security automation system in place to identify such issues in all the software versions. Embracing the idea of DevSecOps will help in the early identification of vulnerabilities before it starts affecting the entire application.
  • Fewer Cybersecurity Breaches
    Cybersecurity breaches can have a negative impact on an organization's brand reputation. By implementing security practices to the development life cycle, organizations are able to reduce the risk of cybersecurity breaches to great extent.
  • Better Team Collaboration
    One of the major benefits of DevSecOps is improved team collaboration. DevSecOps brings development, operations, and security teams together and helps boost cooperation between them.
  • Continuous Improvements
    DevSecOps practices foster a culture of continuous improvement from the very beginning of the software development life cycle.

Organizations are getting benefits from the DevSecOps end-to-end security implementations. Since automation saves the time, and fast failure recovery, more organizations are adopting DevSecOps practices.

How DevSecOps Work?

The DevSecOps focusing on the security, and the given below are some primarily testing areas for a secured DevOps process.

Appropriate Configuration
It ensures that the software is built in accordance with the standards. Every tool for automated testing is designed to operate in an appropriate environment. Hence getting the right tool is important.

Code Analysis
The tools used for code analysis scan the code efficiently and find the vulnerabilities affected in the code. The code analysis tools help the DevOps to process its whole cycle of performance in an effective way.

Application Security Testing
The application security testing is carried out to scan the application to observe whether any malicious practices have occurred or not. This really helps to ensure application security.

DevSecOps practice makes the entire process along with security checks and this is why DevSecOps has benefits over DevOps.

Wrapping Up

DevOps helps to increase the rate of software delivery and focuses on the things that helps to improve the business, the DevSecOps, that works with the same principle of DevOps, but focusing on providing better outcomes by giving importance to security as well.

While DevOps practices are vulnerable to cyber-attacks, DevSecOps makes the applications secure from the attackers by finding vulnerabilities from the initial stage itself.. This is one of the core benefits of DevSecOps. The whole practice of DevOps helps to deliver the good results but finding a vulnerability at that late stage can give headaches to the team.

Explore HashRoot's DevSecOps services to know how we can help you adopt DevSecOps practices in your organization.