DevSecOps 101 - Introduction

In this series, I’ll guide you through the world of DevSecOps, starting with the fundamentals, exploring its impact, and moving on to advanced topics like integrating various security scans into CI/CD pipelines.

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps stands for development, security, and operations. It's an approach to culture, automation, and platform design that integrates security as a shared responsibility throughout the entire IT lifecycle.

DevSecOps is about building security into apps and systems from the beginning (shift-left security). It also uses automation to keep security checks from slowing down development.

Following on that, in practical terms, DevSecOps simply means the following:

Embedding security into the DevOps culture – making security everyone’s responsibility, not just the security team's.
Securing DevOps processes and methodologies – ensuring that CI/CD pipelines, version control, and deployment practices are safe.
Hardening DevOps tools and environments – securing tools like Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code setups.

Why adopt DevSecOps?

1. The current wave of digital transformation made every business a software-centric company: Therefore application and data security have a critical role in avoiding breaches. Additionally, data protection laws like the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) increased the pressure upon companies to protect their digital assets, which is impossible to guarantee with occasional vulnerability assessments.

2. It can help reduce costs while improving software delivery quality: To fix vulnerabilities before an application is placed into production costs a hundred times less. The price tag also is diminished when your team is steadily improving security controls rather than responding to incidents that can presumably impact the business brand and ability to make new deals.

3. DevSecOps reduces cloud-computing complexibility: Along with Agile and DevOps, the past ten years have seen the rise of the microservice and containers model where monolithic applications are broken down into smaller parts that run independently. This breakdown has also impacted how software is distributed, leading to the increased adoption of public clouds. And cloud-native applications and data don’t lend themselves to static perimeters, security policies, and checklists, making the job of InfoSec professionals even more complex. This is why we need to make our applications and infrastructures resilient and integrate security at every stage of their life cycle.

Phases of DevSecOps?

DevSecOps integrates security into every stage of the DevOps pipeline — ensuring continuous, automated protection from start to finish.

1. Plan: Teams collaborate to identify potential risks and define a security strategy. This phase is mostly manual and focuses on early planning.
2. Code: Secure coding practices like static analysis (SAST), code reviews, and pre-commit hooks are used.
3. Build: As code is compiled, security checks run on dependencies and artifacts.
4. Test: Dynamic security tests (DAST) scan for vulnerabilities like XSS, SQLi, and auth issues.
5. Release: Focuses on infrastructure hardening, secrets management, and access control.
6. Deploy: Verifies production environment security using runtime tools. Encourages chaos engineering to test system resilience.

In the upcoming posts, we'll walk through each phase and explore how to implement security at every step