The DevSecOps model for application security is growing in popularity. In fact it has been predicted to reach a whopping $17.24 billion by 2028.
However, incorporating it into your organization can be a bit of a challenge. So, to get you started, here are 10 things that you should look for when evaluating a DevSecOps platform.
A Strong Security Engineering Pipeline
A new report from Stratecast|Frost & Sullivan says that by 2021, more than 50 percent of global 2000 companies will have adopted the DevSecOps approach, up 10 percent since 2016.
Security automation and orchestration tools are a must to implement DevSecOps practices fully. These tools allow security teams to perform vulnerability discovery, application security testing, exploit development, and security hardening.
Whether it is humans or AI executing risk analysis, it should be continuous and automated to discover and fix gaps in real-time and without unnecessary human intervention.
Continuous Security Verification
Security must continuously verify that code, configuration changes, and infrastructure modifications are secure. Make sure the tools you select provide this capability.
A DevSecOps platform must offer continuous security verification (CSV), built on technologies with the ability to scan code, run tests and report back in real-time with results.
A platform should also provide an API that other applications or tools can leverage to act on findings.
Security Testing Workflow
The platform should provide a workflow that enables security teams to identify and respond to application security threats quickly. The workflow should include the ability to:
- Create and manage security test cases.
- Identify vulnerable code and test it for vulnerabilities.
- Automatically prioritize and track vulnerabilities based on risk.
- Trigger an automated response when a vulnerability is found.
The workflow should share results across teams to be aware of new vulnerabilities and can instantly check if their code is impacted.
Results can be assigned to the responsible engineer with notifications for follow-up.
Security Testing Automation
Security testing must be automated. Not only should the platform automate manual processes, but it should also include an automated application security testing (AST) tool that can perform vulnerability discovery and security code analysis.
A solution must support automation to meet the speed required by modern development teams. Automated security testing also provides the ability to standardize security across all components involved in each stage of the application lifecycle, from infrastructure to app logic and backend services.
Security Testing at All Stages
Security testing must be done throughout the SDLC, not just at the end. You should ensure the platform you select provides security testing capabilities for all stages: design, development, test, and production.
Whether it’s unit tests, integration tests, or contract testing, a platform should enable automatic code scanning at every stage of the development pipeline, not just at unit or functional testing.
Security Testing at Scale
A DevSecOps platform should support security testing for large volumes of components across multiple projects and applications, including an API, so that developers can easily integrate scanning into their existing workflows.
The process must also be able to scale to cloud deployments with flexibility so that more teams can use it without unnecessary overhead.
Support for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery
A platform should be part of the CI/CD pipeline, so developers can run security tests on every build while completed and not just before deployment.
It allows any vulnerability that is introduced to be immediately identified and fixed at earlier stages, reducing the risk of it being exploited in production.
The more tightly DevSecOps teams can integrate their pipeline tooling with existing application development tools, the better they can leverage each solution’s capabilities.
Parallel Testing on Multi-Cloud Environments
Most DevSecOps platforms support parallel testing, ensuring that security testing is not only fast but scalable.
Parallel scanning supports large-scale projects running on multi-cloud environments by utilizing multiple resources to scan for vulnerabilities across different components and libraries.
A platform should leverage all resources available across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments to speed up remediation time for large deployments.
Security Configuration Management
Once vulnerabilities are identified, the platform should help manage and remediate them by providing a security configuration management (SCM) solution. SCM streamlines the process of identifying and correcting vulnerabilities in applications, servers, and networks.
The platform should provide an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) to manage security policies across different systems. Security administrators can use this to “drag and drop” policies across components, including servers, databases, libraries, packages, operating systems, and so on.
Security configuration management should be a part of the platform to ensure all systems are compliant and secure.
Support for Static Analysis
Static analysis is one of the most effective ways to identify coding vulnerabilities early in software development. A platform should offer static analysis capabilities to help developers find and fix coding issues before reaching production.
When looking for a DevSecOps platform, make sure it offers all of these features to ensure your applications are secure at every stage of the development process.
Also Read: Improvements of cybersecurity by AI and its applications
