7 DevSecOps Best Practices For 2022

DevSecOps Best Practices For 2022

DevSecOps is a mix of culture, strategy, and technical implementation. As a result, understanding where to start and how to “get it right” can be a challenge. Below, we’ll review the 7 DevSecOps best practices for 2022 to help enterprises get the most out of DevSecOps. 

#1: Shift left

Traditionally, security scanning and evaluations were implemented once a software product was built and ready to be deployed (or even already deployed) to production. This made correcting security issues difficult, expensive, and likely subject to deadline pressures. Shift left security emphasizes integrating security into the software development lifecycle (SDLC) as early as possible to help address these challenges and make security a priority. 

From a technical perspective, that means developers writing code with security best practices in mind and leveraging code scanning solutions like static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST),  interactive application security testing (IAST), and source composition analysis (SCA) to help detect insecure code before it’s deployed to production. However, shift left goes beyond just code. It also means making security a priority in the planning, analysis, and design phases of the SDLC. 

By shifting security left, enterprises can detect security issues and misconfigurations early on to increase product quality and security, while decreasing the time and effort required to address vulnerabilities. 

#2: Automate 

Manual processes are error-prone and difficult to scale. Additionally, too many manual processes increase the likelihood of misconfigurations. And misconfigurations are one of the biggest security threats facing enterprises today. For example, in 2021 the Check Point Research (CPR) team found that misconfiguration of cloud services exposed data of over 100 million users. 

Automation helps ensure security practices are implemented and validated throughout a CI\CD pipeline. That’s why automation is one of the most important DevSecOps best practices. To avoid misconfigurations and prevent/detect and remediate vulnerabilities, enterprises can and should automate everything from code being written in an IDE to IAM roles in production. 

#3: Adopt security as code

Security as code is the codification of security policies, scans, and validations. In many ways, the benefits of security as code are comparable to infrastructure as code (IaC). With security as code, enterprises can ensure that they are consistently implementing secure policies across their infrastructure, streamline deployments, leverage version control, and enable automation throughout their pipelines.

Like automation, and other DevSecOps best practices, security as code has the dual benefit of increasing security and improving operations. Once security implementations are codified, they’re significantly easier to repeat and scale.  

#4: Integrate The Right Tools

While effective DevSecOps requires organizational buy-in and a culture that prioritizes security, enterprises still need the right tooling to implement DevSecOps security best practices. For example, modern security-conscious enterprises often use appsec tools like SAST, dynamic security application testing (DAST), interactive application security testing (IAST), and source composition analysis (SCA) to help improve their overall security posture.

Additionally, because microservices and containerization are cornerstones of modern application infrastructure, DevSecOps tools that can provide functions like image assurance, intrusion detection, and runtime protection for containers are essential for robust security. 

Of course, simply having the latest tools isn’t enough. Enterprises need to effectively integrate DevSecOps tools into their pipelines. That’s why DevSecOps security platforms with a robust API are so compelling. They make it possible to extend and integrate tools into a wide variety of platforms and use cases.

#5: Share Responsibility Throughout The Organization

“Security is everyone’s responsibility” is a fundamental truth of DevSecOps. Everyone involved in designing, approving, building, maintaining, or funding modern software projects must be responsible for prioritizing security. 

In practice, developers and engineers are often responsible for the tactical implementation of DevSecOps best practices. However, for security to be robust, product owners, project managers, and even the C-suite must do their part from a strategic perspective. 

#6: Communicate

Communication silos are one of the biggest threats to enterprise security. While security and observability tooling can provide the information enterprises need to detect threats, clear, timely, and direct communication across teams is a must. 

That means ensuring all relevant stakeholders are involved in decisions, responsibilities are clear, and security is legitimately a priority for all business units. Additionally, avoiding alert fatigue is an important aspect of maintaining solid DevSecOps communication. If there are too many trivial alerts or false positives, it may be unclear when to actually escalate a serious security issue. 

#7: Educate 

The cloud abstracts away some complexities because service providers are responsible for “security of the cloud” (e.g. physical security and operating system patches). However, with the shared responsibility models AWS and other cloud providers use, individual enterprises are still responsible for the “security in the cloud” (e.g. secure configurations and serverless functions). 

Therefore, enterprises must ensure their teams are educated on the “why”and the “how” of DevSecOps. For engineers and developers, part of security education is staying up to date on DevSecOps methods  and implementing that knowledge day-to-day. However, effective DevSecOps education in an enterprise also means stakeholders, including the C-suite, need to understand the benefits of DevSecOps so they can help drive adoption across the organization.