Cloud is said to be a complicated virtual world where different types of organizations manage various types of cloud services and the environment. The significant division is between the cloud provider, the one who provides the core infrastructure and the customer, who makes use of the services or develops an application using resources from the provider. For a larger organization, different cloud resources, data, and applications are taken care of by various lines of businesses, each with their money and development resources.
From a security point of view, implementing such type of divided ownership of the cloud gives way to challenges in terms of end-to-end visibility, control, and compliance. Cloud is a well-known shared infrastructure, but looking at security events, shared responsibilities will always be present. Lack of centralized security technology and uneven security policies, standards set for potential gray areas of responsibilities builds a security gap, and let critical data and other digital resources at risk.
Evolution of DevOps
DevOps was introduced to overcome all security hardships and to work with greater flexibility.
DevOps is a philosophical culture and a set of processes that bring development and operations teams together to design complete software development. This lets organizations create and improve products at a faster rate contradicting traditional software development approaches. Such techniques are getting highly populated at a faster pace.
The DevOps is a combination of the words “development” and “operations.” DevOps security breaks down the barriers between software development and IT operations.
Formula for a successful DevOps:
DevOps = IaC CI/CD SRE
IaC (Infrastructure as Code)
The infrastructure automation helps to define, review, update, and manage applications, pipelines, and infrastructure as code. Different automated IT processes such as asset management, change management, configuration management, application deployments, security policies, network management, and more help to accelerate the process.
CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment)
Continuous deployment of software to the users is key to the successful development of the software.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) operations
SRE operations help to automate change management, performance monitoring, scaling, security configuration, cloud cost monitoring, and optimization.
Stack automation templates used for cloud environments are implemented with built-in compliance, security, and best practices.
These above-specified areas for DevOps automation encourage successful engineering practices that allow companies to achieve the full potential of the cloud. Automation of repeating tasks such as testing, configuration, and deployment helps organizations to free up valuable time and resources. This will, in turn, help to concentrate on building new software features and reduce the chance of human error in everyday tasks.
DevOps with cloud security
The cloud security threats include data breaches, advanced persistent threats (APTs), abuse, and nefarious uses of cloud services. A report by Cloud Security Alliance shows how malicious actors misuse weekly secured or misconfigured cloud systems to exploit malicious uses of computing tools, such as distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks or attempts to exfiltrate data as part of a breach.
Such scenarios seek security as a top priority for all the organizations that develop and deploy applications and workloads in the cloud—giving a clear indication that DevOps and security teams need to merge teams and tools.
DevOps developer is aware of the fact that security testing is a crucial part of the continuous testing procedure. Developers also know that they need to give more time for building an extensive testing model to identify as many possible security gaps as possible and to check that implemented protective activities are being performed as expected.
Final thoughts
Every organization should always remain one step forward when it comes to security breaches and take appropriate measures to increase software security. Implementing DevOps is a smart step that every organization could take to reduce the risk of breaches. The introduction of a comprehensive security validation plan that can be applied automatically as part of any release (and also as part of the CI process) and the incorporation of cloud workload protection solutions to track and enforce security controls is a successful first step.
