Five Core Tenets Of Highly Effective DevSecOps Practices

Five Core Tenets Of Highly Effective DevSecOps Practices

May 21, 2024 at 08:06AM

The text discusses the challenge of making modern applications more secure without disrupting the high-velocity DevOps processes. It emphasizes the critical importance of building and running a DevSecOps practice, highlighting five guiding principles: establishing a security-minded culture, shifting security left, maintaining governance and guardrails, securing the software supply chain, and achieving continuous security through automation and AI. These principles provide a framework for effective DevSecOps implementation.

The main takeaways from the meeting notes are as follows:

1. The challenges of building modern applications securely within high-velocity DevOps processes are well understood, and the urgency for software-producing organizations to adopt DevSecOps practices is greater than ever.

2. Establishing a collaborative, security-minded culture is essential for successful DevSecOps. This involves fostering a shared responsibility for security, providing regular internal security training, promoting developer adoption of secure coding methodologies, and breaking down functional silos for continuous collaboration.

3. Shifting security information left in the software development lifecycle is important, but it’s crucial to also shift the security workload away from developers to avoid impacting production velocity. This involves security owning the orchestration and automation of security tests, prioritizing vulnerabilities, and providing actionable guidance for remediation.

4. Proper governance and guardrails should be maintained to prevent security and compliance risks. This includes fine-grained Role-based Access Control (RBAC), overlaying policies on pipelines, and using templates to eliminate potential errors.

5. Securing the entire software supply chain, including open source software components, is a critical focus. This involves governing the use of open source components, generating and managing software bills of materials (SBOMs), ensuring SLSA compliance, and establishing a chain of custody for all software artifacts.

6. Achieving continuous security through automation and AI is important, including orchestrating security scans throughout pipelines, automating vulnerability list deduplication and prioritization, and providing AI-generated remediation guidance.

Overall, building and running a highly effective DevSecOps practice requires a cohesive and collaborative approach among developers, DevOps engineers, and security practitioners while prioritizing security without compromising development velocity and experience. The five core DevSecOps tenets and their respective guidelines provide an operational foundation for achieving this goal.

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