Secure DevOps largely depends on the combination of strategies, technology, processes, and policies to protect its environment. DevOps’ distinctive methods have shown organizations the way they should develop IT infrastructure and develop and maintain cloud applications. Here are five best practices for secure DevOps security.
- Adopt DevSecOps Model
DevSecOps refers to a philosophy of incorporating security practices in the DevOps process. It involves following a “security as code” culture for flexible and ongoing collaboration between security teams and engineers. DevOps security requires cross-functional collaboration. It also needs the developers to integrate security throughout the product development lifecycle.
DevSecOps embed cyber-security functions and governance into essential functions like privilege management and identity access management. The DevSecOps model also focuses on vulnerability management, configuration management, code review, and threat management. When the model is done right, it enables significant product releases and prevents costly recalls.
- Perform Vulnerability Management
The DevOps best security practices stress the importance of scanning, assessing, and remediating vulnerabilities across integration and development environments. All of this is done before the system is deployed to production.
Any platform’s security dramatically depends on the penetration testing and attack mechanisms used to identify weaknesses in the pre-production code. It also helps identify areas for betterment. When the applications are launched, security tools can test the production software’s security and the infrastructure to find out issues and exploits.
- Embrace Configuration Management
The security tools scan the complete DevOps product cycle to identify misconfigurations and remediate any potential errors. It also strengthens all configurations. The hardening baseline scanning across web servers and the continuous structures enforce virtual and physical cloud assets’ best protection.
- Enforce Governance and Policies
Proper governance and enforcement of policies are crucial for the security of the DevOps environment. It would be best to create policies that are easy to understand for developers and team members. It is also crucial the teams agree to the policies and help them design code that meets the application’s security requirements.
- Plan Comprehensive Discovery
The visibility of the tools and cloud resources is an essential factor in secure DevOps. The security tools need to scan and discover approved and unapproved devices and tools continuously. The system should also find and validate accounts and bring them under security management as per usage policies.
- Use DevSecOps Secret Management to Secure Access
DevOps teams use a variety of tools that require secret management. These secrets might include APIs tokens, SSH keys, privileged account credentials.
The security tools might be used by humans or cloud instances/microservices/containers/applications. It would help if you were careful about secret management as any exposed secrets can provide hackers an easy backdoor to privileged access. DevSecOps secret management removes embedded credentials from code and stores them safely.
- Monitor, Control, and Audit Access
One of the best security practices of DevOps is the least privileges. The access policies are designed to give minimal privilege access to entities to reduce external and internal attackers’ opportunities. It also means ending the practice of providing admin privileges to the end-user machines.
To sum up, these are the five best DevOps security practices embraced by most teams.
