Should you upgrade your DevOps engineering services to DevSecOps when constant security monitoring and an instant response to emerging cyber threats are already essential parts of the DevOps responsibilities?
The short answer is yes when you need to enhance security throughout the entire system development lifecycle and prevent the same vulnerabilities from recurring in your source code.
However, implementing DevSecOps can be challenging: switching to DevSecOps can take much time and result in inefficiencies. Also, it can create cost overhead without necessary cultural shifts and relevant expertise:
Let’s check out DevOps vs. DevSecOps differences, similarities, and best practices to determine whether DevSecOps is worth your investment. We also discuss the essential steps for transitioning from DevOps to DevSecOps. Keep reading!
1
What Is DevOps?
What does DevOps stand for? DevOps (Development + Operations) is a set of practices used to unify software development and maintenance processes within one seamless workflow. It is required when a business runs software in a cloud and must retain end users’ loyalty with fast-paced feature deliveries and high performance.
However, there are more reasons for businesses to consider DevOps. Implementing DevOps enables the project team to:
- improve team communication and the overall workflow, which leads to efficient problem-solving,
- automate routine operations,
- use the same environment for development, testing, and production stages,
- improve source code stability and scalability,
- efficiently manage growing software complexity,
- ship features and project enhancements faster than with other approaches,
- optimize consumption of cloud resources, and
- enhance the visibility of cloud costs.
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How Does DevOps Work?
DevOps creates a constant loop that includes the following stages, which come one after another in short iterations:
- Plan: Estimate and prioritize sprint tasks based on their business value.
- Code: Design, develop, or refactor the source code to deliver new features, improvements, bug fixes, etc.
- Build: Pack software and its dependencies into containers, making it ready for testing.
- Test: Check source code against provided requirements manually and with the help of test automation.
- Release: Fix bugs, improve inconsistencies, and prepare packages for deployment.
- Deploy: Deploy software on live servers, making deliverables available to end users.
- Operate: Manage software infrastructure; add and switch off cloud resources.
- Monitor: Check infrastructure performance and errors to eliminate incidents.
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What Is DevSecOps?
What does DevSecOps stand for? DevSecOps (Development + Security + Operations) is an extension of the DevOps approach that focuses on incorporating security practices into all steps of the software development lifecycle.
DevSecOps is a response to both the advantages and disadvantages of DevOps. It enhances DevOps advantages by improving cooperation between security, development, and maintenance teams and providing shared responsibility for software security among all team members.
At the same time, it overcomes a lack of focus on security by encouraging all team members to actively identify and eliminate vulnerabilities early in the sprint rather than shift code checks to late stages when they become the sole responsibility of a dedicated security team.
As part of the general DevOps approach, DevSecOps promotes continuous workflow improvement to increase efficiency and introduce automation, which is important for decreasing the number of duplicates and false positives and prioritizing vulnerabilities based on their severity.
How Does DevSecOps Work?
DevSecOps uses the same loop as DevOps. The difference between DevSecOps and DevOps lies in the security activities added to each stage:
- Plan: Review the security strategy and outline security tasks for the next steps; model threats.
- Code: Develop source code while keeping identified threats and vulnerabilities in mind.
- Build: Perform automated security analysis of committed source code (software component analysis, static application software testing, unit tests); review and scan source code and third-party code dependencies.
- Test: Use dynamic application security testing (DAST) to examine an artifact for known high-severity issues.
- Release: Prepare a build for the production stage.
- Deploy: Check and secure the runtime environment, providing users or processes with access only to allowed areas; manage the environment configuration.
- Operate: Collect logs on user or system activities, install security patches, and configure firewalls.
- Monitor: Check automatically for possible leaks or cyber attacks; block security threats.
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DevOps vs DevSecOps: Short Comparison
Before we dive deep into the similarities and differences between DevOps and DevSecOps, let’s summarize the key aspects of both:
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What Are the Differences between DevOps and DevSecOps?
Now, let’s analyze in detail the differences between DevOps and DevSecOps and see which is more complex to implement:
Priorities
- DevOps: The main goal of the DevOps approach is efficiency. The team focuses on constant optimization, quick shipments, and scaling software infrastructure. The team incorporates security as part of the workflow alongside design, development, or QA, but does not emphasize it.
- DevSecOps: The main goal of DevSecOps is security. The team integrates security into all activities within its workflow, including system design, development, QA, and maintenance, making the entire team accountable for software security.
DevSecOps emphasizes improving the remediation process, quickly prioritizing and closing critical vulnerabilities and enhancing software infrastructure. The delivery pace can be sacrificed to some extent in order for the team to complete all necessary checks.
Process
- DevOps: The DevOps team relies on the CI/CD pipeline, which it uses to decrease the time needed for source code checks, integration, and deployments. The CI/CD pipeline also allows for multiple code deliveries per day, which can help fix bugs and flaws quickly when necessary.
- DevSecOps: The DevSecOps team also relies on the CI/CD pipeline, but it embeds automated security scans and vulnerability identification, enabling the team to reduce the number of possible vulnerabilities that reach production.
Also, the DevSecOps team relies on a shift left, performing security tests early in the development cycle. Shifting left helps with detecting recurring vulnerabilities early, reducing the risk of technical debt that can potentially lead to hacks and related financial losses.
Response
- DevOps: The DevOps team provides a basic response to security challenges. While engineers use best security practices when designing cloud architectures, producing app code, and managing infrastructure, the project pace may slow down in response to growing software complexity and attack surface.
- DevSecOps: In turn, the DevSecOps approach provides an advanced response to security challenges that enables the team to identify threats and vulnerabilities faster than with DevOps and close them efficiently amid growing software complexity.
Moreover, the DevSecOps team introduces improvements to security processes, enabling it to decrease false positives and duplicate alerts. As a result, a DevSecOps team responds to security incidents more efficiently than a DevOps team.
Team responsibilities and skills
- DevOps: Attacks and vulnerabilities are mostly the responsibility of the dedicated security team that, nevertheless, gets help from the maintenance team. The latter can use its acquired monitoring skills to detect security threats and suspicious activities.
- DevSecOps: The entire project team shares responsibility for software security, and each team member needs security skills, no matter their specialization. The organization must consider extra training and regular knowledge exchange between project stakeholders to ensure their expertise.
As a result, the DevSecOps approach requires more skills from individual team members than DevOps, making hiring and onboarding new specialists more difficult.
Tools
- DevOps: DevOps engineers use a staggering 10.3 tools on average to manage complex environments and software infrastructure, monitor software health, automate processes, and improve the team’s workflow.
- DevSecOps: The DevSecOps team adds, on average, three to six different security tools on top of the DevOps toolset. These extra tools are used to automate security scans, manage container security, monitor compliance, check real-time threats, and more.
However, a careful assessment is crucial for integrating DevSecOps tools. Excessive use of such tools can increase complexity of development/maintenance processes, leading to an alert overload and a high volume of false positives.
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Compliance
- DevOps: The DevOps approach can help meet regulatory compliance on safe user data storage, processing, and transmission as part of the system requirements without prioritizing it and can be sufficient for many software projects.
- DevSecOps: The DevSecOps team prioritizes regulatory compliance and works proactively to meet regulations, which is beneficial for complex projects that can face legal and financial consequences in case of a data breach.
DevSecOps works better than DevOps for systems processing and storing sensitive user data, such as electronic health records and telehealth systems, human resources management software, and banking apps.
Benefits
- DevOps: Despite challenges and implementation complexity, investing in DevOps pays off through fast product shipments, optimized infrastructure costs, and high-quality source code. For instance, 99% of participants in a DevOps survey by Atlassian saw positive changes after implementing DevOps, such as fast releases, improved quality, and happy teams and customers.
- DevSecOps: A switch to DevSecOps enables the project team to enhance security processes, ensuring the same or a similar delivery timeline as when using DevOps. DevSecOps lets companies respond to emerging security challenges immediately. It also improves efficiency through automation, cloud visibility, and workflow optimization.
Challenges
- DevOps: The DevOps approach is challenging both technically and culturally. A successful DevOps transformation requires extensive rework to implement the CI/CD pipeline, microservices architecture, monitoring system, and more. Also, an irrelevant DevOps implementation can lead to skyrocketing cloud maintenance costs.
Moreover, organizational changes are required to improve communication between and inside teams and establish a shared vision of project needs, which can be difficult when teams have rigid structures. - DevSecOps: DevSecOps poses extra challenges because engineers must close the security skills gap while focusing on quick and agile deliveries. Additionally, competing priorities – delivery speed vs security level – can lead to clashes between development and business teams.
Costs
Organizations can opt for DevOps outsourcing to optimize costs and access missing expertise. This option lets them engage industry experts at a lower price.
Important note: Organizations need to invest their time in finding the best DevOps/DevSecOps experts for a successful transformation. Hiring an inexperienced professional or vendor can lead to insufficient quality and financial losses.
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Best use case
- DevOps: It’s possible to use DevOps for most startup and enterprise-level cloud projects. However, its benefits are limited to solutions working on internal servers. Also, DevOps can be overkill for tiny apps that do not require constant updates or use cloud resources extensively.
- DevSecOps: This approach can be required in such domains as healthcare, FinTech, social networks, or HR where extra security investment can help minimize the risks of compromising user records and facing fines related to data breaches and exposure of sensitive user information.
As a result, DevSecOps fits best for projects handling sensitive data, while DevOps works well for many projects where unnecessary complexity can slow down project delivery.
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How Are DevOps and DevSecOps Similar?
Let’s analyze the common basis of DevOps and DevSecOps that allows teams to address various aspects of the software development lifecycle:
Collaborative culture
Both DevOps and DevSecOps promote team collaboration, which helps individual team members understand project goals and challenges and quickly respond to requests from other team members.
Also, both promote accountability and shared responsibility, empowering engineers to think of the best solutions for emerging problems and take ownership of project decisions.
Automation
In addition to DevOps automation practices, when engineers automate testing and code deployment to prevent bugs from slipping into the production environment, DevSecOps engineers automate checks and audits to prevent vulnerabilities from reoccurring.
As a result, project teams can efficiently address performance, security, and quality issues.
Continuous monitoring
Active system monitoring is a crucial element of the “Ops” part within both the DevOps and DevSecOps approaches. A continuous monitoring system can respond automatically to events, such as by adding extra resources to handle growing user loads or blocking requests to prevent a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.
The system can also alert the operations team of detected anomalies or incidents that require human intervention.
Continuous improvement
Both DevOps and DevSecOps approaches are focused on increasing team efficiency. Teams use constant feedback to enhance processes, optimize software performance, and improve the codebase.
More importantly, teams focus on long-term solutions for emerging problems to keep them from recurring.
Focus on fast iterations
Project teams use fast-paced iterations within the DevOps/DevSecOps cycle to quickly provide deliverables and receive feedback. This enables the team to refine or switch priorities flexibly: for example, to provide a long-term solution to a critical vulnerability.
Measurements
DevOps and DevSecOps teams set up different measurable KPIs that let teams evaluate the impact of their activities on business goals and focus on those tasks that maximize business value while minimizing effort.
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DevOps and DevSecOps Best Practices
Common DevOps and DevSecOps best practices are used to enhance deliveries:
Shift left
Software optimization and improvement should be addressed as early as the planning and design stages; this strategy decreases the chances of discovering severe challenges in late project stages.
Shared responsibility
The team acts as a single unit; all team members are responsible for project success and knowledge sharing.
Workflow optimization
The project team uses scripts and automation tools to improve repetitive operations, such as test automation, security scans, deployment, and environment setup.
Audits
Both DevOps and DevSecOps engineers conduct regular project audits to identify inefficient processes, gaps, and the state of regulatory compliance.
Tool evaluation
DevOps/DevSecOps engineers must also reconsider the tools and third-party services teams use on the project and assist with transferring the project to an alternative tool or service when necessary.
Here are specific DevSecOps vs. DevOps best practices:
Security across the entire pipeline
DevSecOps adds security considerations, automated testing, and checks to each CI/CD pipeline step.
Secure coding standards
The security team needs to introduce guidelines on secure coding practices and regulatory compliance.
Risk assessment and threat modeling
The security team should also assess potential threats and vulnerabilities and respond with other team members based on priorities.
Incident response plan
Just as a DevOps team has a recovery plan in case of a system crash, a DevSecOps team needs to design, document, and test a plan for managing and recovering from security incidents.
Security training
DevSecOps includes ongoing training on keeping high security standards and identifying vulnerabilities and common threats.
7
Which to Choose: DevOps or DevSecOps?
Good question! Should you invest extra in implementing DevSecOps when DevOps and DevSecOps are not mutually exclusive and DevOps also emphasizes source code and infrastructure security?
Whether you should choose DevOps or DevSecOps will depend on:
- your project’s complexity,
- regulatory requirements, and
- the time available for changes.
Choose DevOps when you prioritize delivery speed, team collaboration, and process efficiency, and when the size of your system enables you to address vulnerabilities quickly and without complicating processes.
Choose DevSecOps when you have a complex business system with intricate data flows that processes sensitive user data within a regulated domain. DevSecOps will help you efficiently integrate a dedicated security team into the workflow.
More importantly, you can switch from DevOps to DevSecOps when security challenges start increasing and DevOps becomes insufficient to cover them. Based on findings from The State of Security Remediation 2024 report by Cloud Security Alliance, these can be signs that you need to transition:
- Prevalence of vulnerabilities and their regular reoccurrence caused by a quick-fix approach rather than using a sustainable, long-term solution
- Lack of visibility in complex cloud environments that poses multiple security challenges
- A growing number of false positives and duplicate alerts due to a lack of refinement and fine-tuning of instruments
- Proliferation of security tools that need to be properly integrated and lead to alert overload
- Inefficient remediation process while security teams respond to alerts manually instead of automating tasks
- Slow response to identified vulnerabilities requiring reconsideration of response prioritization
8
How to Transition from DevOps to DevSecOps
Let’s analyze how your team can transition from DevOps to DevSecOps and eliminate potential DevOps vs cyber security clashes. Here are the key steps:
Initiate an audit
Start by assessing the security of the software system and development processes to identify gaps and inefficiencies. Then, analyze which tools are required and how the team will integrate them into the project.
Set short-term goals
Divide the security work into clear and measurable short-term goals that your team can prioritize based on their severity. This helps the team constantly improve the source code and switch priorities if some are no longer necessary.
Integrate security tools into the CI/CD pipeline
Decide on the team’s security tools for different security tests (SAST, DAST, IAST, and more), scans, analysis, and monitoring based on audit results. It is important to start small with a minimum toolset and gradually add more tools.
Implement automation
Integrate automation tools and scripts for checks and reports where possible to avoid overwhelming the development/maintenance team with extra work. Consider possible overlaps between security scanning systems that could lead to alert fatigue and long response times.
Qualify your staff
Focus on staff training that enables different team members to solve security tasks within their scope of responsibility and be efficient within the DevSecOps framework. Establish, document, and update security standards, and provide security instructions for different roles.
Foster collaboration and accountability
Ensure transparent team communication, enhancing knowledge sharing and required guidance when working on security tasks. Also, encourage team members to take ownership of results.
Measure results and focus on improvements
The key performance metrics of DevSecOps implementation include:
- Deployment frequency – cycle time from planning to production
- Lead time – time needed to move from commit to deployment in production
- Mean time to resolution – time needed to get the code up and running after an incident
- Change failure rate – percentage of changes that went to production and required rework
The team will determine areas for further improvement and refine the security strategy based on these metrics.
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IT Craft’s DevOps and DevSecOps Expertise
As a company that handles projects for clients across regulated domains, IT Craft takes the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps seriously and helps with relevant implementations.
Our team starts with requirements analysis or a project audit to determine security needs and offers security enhancements as part of the DevOps cycle or upgrades processes to DevSecOps.
Limpid Markets
This FinTech solution provides a marketplace for London and Zurich over-the-counter interbank markets, decreasing the time required for financial institutions to exchange information on the prices of precious metals.
The client needed
The client had a complex system already up and running and required a team capable of ensuring an exceptional level of security and rapid system response under high load.
How we helped
The IT Craft team started with a thorough project analysis and prepared a pilot task to show our commitment to meeting the highest security standards. Our team took over the project and delivered new functionality while maintaining stringent security.
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Conclusion
The key DevSecOps vs DevOps difference lies in the focus: DevOps prioritizes delivery speed and efficiency, while DevSecOps adds security on top of DevOps.
DevOps lets you unite disconnected development and operations teams within a streamlined software development lifecycle, increase software quality, and minimize resource waste.
DevSecOps lets you integrate the security team into the workflow to detect and respond quickly to security challenges that can otherwise be overlooked. However, it costs more to implement.
Is the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps worth the extra investment? Yes, if you process sensitive user data. If you are unsure of which to pick, you can start with DevOps and upgrade your workflow as your project and challenges grow.
