Knowledge is power but knowing your organization needs a DevSecOps program is not enough to secure your development pipeline. Organizations face constant threats to their development from attackers trying to steal data or trying to compromise their code to gain deep privileged access in their organization.
Building a DevSecOps program to effectively face these threats can be overwhelming, especially in the face of skilled labor shortages and tightened budgets. The good news is that there is an abundance of choices to be made and solutions out there. Unfortunately, without understanding what you need for an effective program, your organization may be saddled with technology that under-delivers your needs or dramatically exceeds them.
This article will identify ways to get the most out of your DevSecOps program despite the many challenges in today’s global market.
Taking A Wider View
Organizations moving quickly to embrace growth through more agile development processes often focus on growth over security. With tools may not be implemented or only run for specific use cases. They may only run a static code analysis tool (SAST) or dynamic code analysis tool (DAST) and assume that is sufficient to catch everything. Unfortunately, each of these tools only presents a portion of the overall risk of a codebase. By only running one tool, developers can miss essential information and vulnerabilities.
To run an effective DevSecOps program, organizations need more than a single feature tool. Still, whatever tool is selected, it needs to include the capability to correlate included open-source and commercial libraries with known vulnerabilities. Comprehensive tools often leverage free repositories of vulnerability data on the internet that contain listings of known vulnerabilities for given libraries.
Open Source Library scanning helps identify high-risk code versions, such as the recently discovered Log4J vulnerabilities. Identifying these vulnerabilities in the development process can more quickly and efficiently be remediated rather than waiting until they make it into production and require scrambling to remediate quickly.
Prioritizing Results
On the other end of the spectrum, some organizations have the funding to run all of the tools and generate reports on every build. Without someone analyzing the reports, the findings are pointless. The data in the reports needs to be parsed to remove false positives, and then someone must prioritize the vulnerabilities based on criticality and impact.
To make this happen, organizations need to build into the DevSecOps process individuals to own the findings from discovery through remediation. In some organizations, this will require both a developer and a security person to translate and prioritize the findings effectively. Developers are not often security savvy, and security personnel may lack the development chops. By working in tandem, they can capitalize on their strengths and determine the highest priority vulnerabilities and the level of effort required to correct them.
Utilize Scaling Staffing
Delivering effective DevSecOps takes a dedicated amount of staffing and individuals with specialized skill sets. Sometimes, there is a lack of talent or additional cycles to manage the process in the already tight labor market. Organizations can leverage managed services to help fill the skill gap and deliver the service in these situations.
By leveraging managed service providers (MSPs), the organization is not paying for specialized individuals whose only duty is to manage the DevSecOps process or tools just for their organization. Instead, they are leveraging an MSP that also services other organizations similarly. This allows the organization to get the benefits of highly specialized individuals when needed, saving on labor costs and avoiding recruiting, which can be time-consuming. With an MSP, like labor, the tool cost is also distributed over the other organization, allowing access to all of the tools rather than simply having only a few.
Trusted Talent
Businesses looking to build an effective DevSecOps program need a partner to help them avoid the pitfalls and make the most efficient use of their resources. Persistent has a team of skilled professionals that can guide your organization through the development and implementation of a DevSecOps program and provide the capabilities to operationalize it.
Learn more about how Persistent can help your organization create a right fit DevSecOps program to secure your entire CI/CD pipeline.
