Implementing security into an already established and successful development pipelines can be both difficult and intensive. However, ensuring that product delivery also encompasses security through relevant testing is vital for continuous improvement.
Our article this week will focus on how you can begin to review and implement security testing into your development pipelines, and how to ensure that this maintains the already existing drive and efficiency of your teams.
There are three high level goals for integrating security into your pipelines. These are:
* Work on moving security left
* Make security part of the culture
* Streamlining
Let’s break down these goals separately.
Move Security Left
Moving security left in your development pipelines process is vital. The earlier you can identify that security is important, and integrate that into the design, the better. Typically, the product is tested just before deployment. However, with this approach, the earlier you can implement security into the application design, the sooner that security issues are identified and rectified.
Culture
While this is a goal, this tends to meld together once you have addressed the ‘security left’ approach. Once implemented, the culture of your development shifts to an approach where security is part of the product design and introduced as part of the testing methodology.
Streamlining
There are a multitude of ways to improve the effectiveness of the secure design approach. One of the most renown methods of adopting this is to take the existing DevOps approach, and turn this into a DevSecOps one. DevSecOps adopts the security priority and culture goals, and the primary goal of this is to create a software development lifecycle whereby everyone is responsible for security. DevSecOps aims to integrate best security practice into every part of the DevOps workflow, and ultimately turn security from an afterthought to a design goal.