A Guide to DevOps Security Checklist

Organizations nowadays have started to realize the potential of DevOps. A survey conducted by Google says that 77% of organizations are currently either relying on DevOps or plan to do the same in the near future. The key factor behind their decision is the faster deployment of software. Another survey report says that 51% of DevOps users apply DevOps to new and existing applications.

The wide utilization of DevOps has given rise to security concerns to protect their valuable data from phishing. To curb this menace a new branch of DevOps Security aka DevSecOps has emerged. Using DevSecOps, companies embed security through technology, policies, processes, and strategies. In this blog, we will discuss the top 6 DevOps security checklists, one must perform to ensure security compliance.

Steps of DevOps Security Checklist

1. Automate the Code Review Process

No matter how hard you try, you just can’t keep your security team aligned with the DevOps team. In reality, the DevOps team pushes and modifies codes over a very short period of time. Such a rate can easily outpace the security team in the code review process. Without adequate automation, the output generated will either be super slow or will suffer from a lack of security hygiene.

2. Explain the Goal

No doubt that the prime objective of DevOps security is to test the code from a security aspect, but to do so without compromising the speed of deployment is a challenge! A successful DevSecOps team offers clear goals to their team and improves planning. Incorporating DevOps security from the beginning means that security is involved in every process and reduces friction between teams from misalignment. This will in turn result in speeding up release cycles.

3. Cultural Resistance to Security

There is a prevalent belief that implementing security will stifle or halt development. However, detecting a security defect early in the design and development process costs far less time and effort than having to patch the problematic code in the later stages of the development cycle.

4. DevOps and Cloud Environments

In the DevOps cloud environments, the DevOps teams often rely on open-source immature tools for managing 100s of server instances. As DevOps operate on such a tremendous scale, a simple misconfiguration such as sharing of APIs, SSH keys, etc can cause operational dysfunction and exploit security.

5. Work in Smaller Chunks

Whenever you are shifting from DevOps to DevSecOps for security compliance, always tend to make incremental code changes. A small bit of code is easier to review and deploy than trying to deploy the whole chunk of code. Trying to deploy a monolithic project will not only create friction between your DevOps and security team but also will make you prone to make security errors.

6. Containers and Third-Party Tools

The DevOps environment makes use of containers and third-party tools like Docker, Kubernetes, CoreOs, etc. to improve their productivity. These containers are ultra-lightweight, portable, and can run on any kind of computer or cloud. However, without any proper controls, these productivity tools can pose security risks due to the lack of visibility into them. Due to this reason, containers are not adequately scanned, which further elevates the problem. A study report by ThreatStack reveals that almost 94% of organizations said that containers pose security threats for their organizations.

Conclusion

With the increase in demand for faster software deployment, DevOps is bound to get more popular in the future. Along with this, the newly emerged branch of DevSecOps will grow in popularity to safeguard the digital products from security dysfunctions. In this blog, we have covered 6 steps of the DevOps security checklist that will help you in streamlining security along with your DevOps team.