As more and more organizations adopt DevOps, they’re finding it easier to do the following:
- Remove unnecessary silos
- Foster plenty of collaboration
- Improve the quality of products, AND
- Speed up the amount of time for products to reach market
However, to do those things, your DevOps must have the best security to date. With that said, here are 7 tips on how to effectively secure your DevOps:
- Look At Architecture And Design FIRST
“When thinking about DevOps security, you’ll need to start during the architecture and design phase,” says Jack Dalley, a security manager at Assignment Service and Revieweal. “Understanding the scope of your DevOps infrastructure, as well as what elements need protection, is vital to ensuring better security for it as a whole. Here, you’ll need to implement Threat Modeling, which allows you and your security team to identify the threats against each different component, and what protections need to be put in place to ensure a well-running DevOps pipeline.”
- Test Post-Build
Once you complete a DevOps build, you must test it out. How? By running a core DevOps practice, which runs automated builds and unit tests after the system checks in. Here, your security team can add testing tools to automate the validation and security of the build. If, for some reason, the build has any vulnerabilities or other issues, the test can let your security team know right away, so that they can go in any fix them.
- Secure And Hardening The OS
Your operating system (OS) will need to be hardened, meaning that your team should secure it before starting a project, so that they can spot any issues ahead of time. While not hardening is NOT an option at this time, it’s still good to know that if, for some reason, hardening must be reduced, security teams can work with the developer to find other ways of performing certain functions. Other than that, securing and hardening your OS is a must.
- Use Security Tools
Deploying your security tools in your DevOps is another thing to consider. That means that you’ll have to keep track of multiple teams deploying multiple applications at once during production. Here’s how to effectively deploy your security tools in your DevOps:
- Script your deployment to ensure that your tools are deployed at the same time.
- Detect any threats on your network.
- Monitor your HTTP and log files for any attacks.
- Implement a Managed Detection and a Response solution, to monitor different feeds all at once.
- Have a 24/7 SOC investigate any threats that can be escalated.
- Run Vulnerability Scans Regularly
Believe it or not, cyber attackers will target vulnerabilities in any OS or applications that run on servers. Therefore, it’s important for you and your security team to run scans on the servers that your DevOps is running on. By doing so, security teams can find any vulnerabilities that need to be fixed.
- Harden Cloud Deployment
Cloud services can either work for or against you. Here’s how:
- When implemented correctly, cloud services can ensure that your DevOps infrastructures are secure.
- However, when done wrong, cloud services can create holes in your security.
Therefore, be sure to monitor how your company is using the cloud, even if it’s allowing only a handful of people to access it or be admins for it. You can also implement two-factor authentication.
- Audit Ongoing And Real-Time Production
“During the final stages of securing your DevOps, you’ll need to audit any production that’s ongoing, and any that are done in real-time,” says David Howard, a DevOps expert at UKWritings and State Of Writing. “Surveying production is crucial, because it helps you and your security team to understand what’s going on in production, and implement any corrections that need to be made, so that production continues to work soundly. The important rule here is to achieve a suitable auditing level that can be fed into a security tool that can show you the needed data without taking a toll on your servers. Plus, it’s recommended that you audit your systems several times a day for the best results.”
Conclusion
As you can see, DevOps takes plenty of security to not just ensure that applications well, but also to allow security teams to enable the safest practices possible, while automating various software development workflows. By following this quick guide’s tips, your DevOps will be safe and secure going into the future.
