The use software has wide spread throughout the world in short time. Our day-to-day activities now depend upon the use of software-intensive goods and invention in both domestic and industrial domains.
Most recently, the company has shown the potential to implement new features with post-haste to meet the industry’s need. The software features are in line with ever evolving innovation meeting the completive environment of the market.
For this reason, speed and time are the important ingredients for software development industry to market the end products before the competitor.
The software industry seem to greatly follow the “The early bird catches the worm” and that’s why the swift delivery and the promotion of the new features at their earliest provides business with new opportunities to grow, obtain quick feedback from customers and design the next new feature accordingly to the customer’s need.
With all this, questions of security in software have also been raised. Many software companies still don’t possess protective measures in place to fight cyber-attacks. Ergo, they are faced with security threats and data breaches like loss of data, data theft which directly impact customers’ loyalty and revenue.
DevOps is a practice that is known to provide useful patterns that contains principles that are useful in the software development phase. DevOps has played the important role to answer to customer needs without sacrificing the productivity.
As the new age demands the companies to deliver more secure software, let’s take a look at what is included in implementation of the DevOps process:
Execution of the DevSecOps Process
DevOps contributes to promote team work, fast delivery and deployment process, automating testing against the completed application while testing the user interface (UI), API and backend. Eliminating or highlighting the loop holes. Monitor production environment for any malicious cyber activity.
Implementation of DevOps best practices in an organization gives birth to a team of engineers working together. The team comprises of coding experts -developers, testers and cyber security engineers promising the collaborative, productive and secure environment and smooth workflow.
This DevOps constructs several steps that are executed in the continuous loop to obtain the desired product. Let’s dive deeper into the DevOps process flow:
- Planning: DevOps ask for a collaborative environment to plan out the customers’ requirements carefully and map out each function or non-functional requirement, development and testing criteria, design and security plan.
- Agile Coding: Management of code, selection of source code development tools are all part of DevOps process promising short development cycle.
- Continuous Integration: Regular merging of codes is the key to continuous integration. This ensures that the developers always have the latest code. Use of version control plays an important part in preserving the original code in DevOps, simulatnously allowing different coders to code. CI avoids expensive development loopholes, allowing many developers to work reliably on the same source code make this practice crucial stage of DevOp workflow.
- Continuous Deployment pipelines: This automated process releases the approved changes to users. This makes the deployment pipelines easy target to external threats. Proper security measures should be implemented to withstand external and internal threats.
- Ceaseless testing in each phase: In DevOps, every process is automated. Similarly,to ensure your development cycle is not hindered by any malicious hurdle, DevOps offers strong security ground with robust and automated testing by testing both back and front-end, databases and API.
Moreover, make the automated tools used for testing should actively identify the potential threats, poor code and infrastructure. Infusing the security in the each development phase ensure source code safety and secure application not accessible to the unauthorized person.
- Continuous
delivery: this ensures the
development of software change in short time. The process is automated thus any
change in the code is automatically compiled, tested vigorously and then sent
into the production. This primarily helps the customer to get the updated
release in time.
- Monitoring: Monitoring of issues and customers’ feedback are crucial part for the complete development cycle. Monitoring tools are used to quickly escalate the problems in the deployment and production environment.
Benefits of Incorporating DevOps for Secure Software Development
Here are a few benefits reported and noted by incorporating DevOps for secure development process and DevOps best practices:
- Better quality of system: Customer is provided with the system of better and improved quality. DevOps ensures the quality of the system using its automated testing help early identification of bugs at different steps of software development
- Early Detection of Security defects and threats: As continuous testing iscarriedout, it becomes easy to detect security defect and threats in the software. End-users are provided with software that has gone through testing on each development stage.
- Promoting teamwork and collaboration between developers and operations. The main DevOps approach is to combine the development and operations by promoting communication between the two. Improve the production environment. This is the key to develop the system in less time, more release, bug-free and better customer feedback.
Final Thoughts
It is without a doubt that DevOps meets all the challenges and capricious demands of the security of software in the Information technology world. Introducing DevOp practices in the earlier stages of software development helps mitigate security threats.
With modern technologies, threats are increasing and modifying its mechanism to harm systems. In this time of need, DevOps and security should work as a fight force to secure your business and revenue.
