Why can DevOps culture benefit your organization?
The integration of Agile methods over the last decade has highlighted the need for a more holistic approach to the software development process. But this approach doesn't have to be reserved for source code production alone... DevOps is an IT mindset that encourages communication, collaboration, integration and automation between software developers and IT operations to improve the speed and quality of software delivery.
Finally, DevOps is part of the digital transformation of businesses!
The DevOps approach has one overriding objective: to deliver the best possible experience for customers and even other businesses. Setting up a DevOps team eliminates organizational silos, optimizes the delivery of software services and functionalities, and reduces all deadlines (infrastructure provisioning, production launch, technical testing, marketing campaign preparation, etc.).
To understand how this is possible, let's look at the four pillars of DevOps:
- Culture: DevOps isn't just about technology. Above all, it's about encouraging and improving communication and collaboration throughout the software development process to achieve the best possible result.
- Automation: the use of automated processes is a fundamental concept. By leveraging automation, DevOps is designed to optimize productivity, prevent defects, spot vulnerabilities and create consistency. But beware of moving too fast: automating the wrong processes can quickly lead to chaos and destabilize the organization.
- Measurement: the idea of continuous improvement of the program through various indicators and measures.
- Sharing: sharing tools and code with team members enables new features to be implemented.
These four pillars offer two major advantages:
- A dynamic image
Users frequently receive new features and updates. Indirectly, this confirms to them that your company is responsive and professional. In a word, it sets itself apart from the competition.
- Better responsiveness
Thanks to continuous integration, errors or vulnerabilities can be spotted and corrected more quickly.
Even if continuous integration should be a recurring practice, the fact remains that, under intense pressure to accelerate development cycles and improve quality assurance, a DevOps team can also be the source, directly or indirectly, of security flaws.
Indeed, today's development cycles don't (always) leave time to stop at vulnerability testing before delivering new products and functionalities to the enterprise. This is regularly illustrated by the delivery of a new software version that leaves a number of "open doors".
This can lead to data leaks (with consequences that can no longer be underestimated since the RGPD came into force...), identity theft, the possibility of infiltrating an Information System (IS)....
There can be many reasons for this: bad code, misconfigured servers or containers...
You'll be communicating all the time!
It's a short step from believing that the DevOps approach sacrifices security in the name of innovation and business. How can priority updates be deployed to correct vulnerabilities when the DevOps team must absolutely finish a project within the day?
This question needs to be asked. And a solution must be found quickly, because any conflict between the two businesses could lead to delays in both processes.
How do you deal with this? The answer: deploy a modern approach to security based on automation (which is one of the 4 pillars of DevOps). That's the aim of DevSecOps, whose objective is to get developers to think more about security principles (including Privacy by Design, in order to be precisely compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation - GDPR) and standards as they progress through a project.
Tools are available for :
- analyze its configurations in search of best security practices;
- automate tests (for example, Gauntlt, a free framework);
- scan code for potential vulnerabilities or identify and prevent security problems in real time (e.g. Veracode or Contrast Security).
Here, too, communication is essential. Collaboration between DevOps and security teams must be permanent and transparent. To successfully integrate security into the DevOps process, CIOs and developers need to work together and establish shared responsibility.
