DevSecOps: shift left and put security first

Security is fundamental – to your software, your organisation, and your customers. Our end-to-end DevSecOps solutions help you shift left, integrate security into your DevOps processes, and make it a continuous part of your software development life cycle.

What is DevSecOps?

DevOps introduced processes like continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) into software development, ensuring code is actively tested and verified along the way in an agile development process. DevSecOps applies this same thinking to your security.

It relies on continuous audits and automated vulnerability testing to make sure security is an intrinsic part of your product, rather than just something that’s bolted on once it’s been built. DevSecOps also requires your teams to think differently, with everyone – not just security teams – taking responsibility for software safety.

Get up to speed on DevSecOps

What is DevSecOps? The fundamentals of DevSecOps

DevSecOps adds security to your DevOps model, but what’s it all about and why is it so important?

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DevSecOps Basics: Four Ways to Integrate Security into DevOps

To practice DevOps securely, you must avoid treating security as a silo.

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DevSecOps: embrace a ‘shift-left’ approach to put security first

For DevSecOps to work, everyone needs to be responsible; requiring a cultural shift across the board.

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Benefits of DevSecOps

Reduce risk

Identify vulnerabilities early and keep on top of threats to improve overall software security and stability.

Accelerate software innovation

Free up your people to focus on higher-value work, ensuring you stay steps ahead of cybercriminals and your competition.

Lower costs

Finding and fixing problems earlier will reduce operational and development costs for your organisation.

Faster delivery

With security bottlenecks significantly reduced or eliminated, product delivery speed increases.

Improve responsiveness

Efficient, effective, up-to-date response strategies help speed up post-incident recovery.

Happier customers

Build trust with your customers by offering them a more secure, stable software experience.

Better collaboration

When security is everyone's responsibility, you improve cross-team communication and collaboration.

Increased sales

Easier compliance

Managers have greater visibility of which measures are in place, making it easier to meet industry regulations.

Go deeper with DevSecOps

DevOps to DevSecOps: a secure evolution

Get up to speed on all key processes to help you implement DevSecOps and transform your SDLC.

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8 common DevSecOps challenges and how to overcome them

Be prepared for common blockers to DevSecOps and your integration has a greater chance of success.

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Transform operational security – shift left with DevSecOps

Unlock the challenges, concerns, and solutions to transform your organisation's operational security.

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A mature, measured approach

Security risk isn’t restricted to one part of your life cycle – it exists in all parts of the value stream. Value stream management (VSM) provides information for data-driven conversations, and gives your teams confidence to make improvements and fix any weak spots. With insights early and often, your DevSecOps teams can collaborate more easily to build safer software.

As your DevSecOps initiative matures, you can use VSM to incorporate, manage, and monitor:

Secure coding practices
Security-as-code (SaC)
Static and dynamic application security testing
Network, application, and dependency scanning
Security monitoring

VSM helps you measure how successful your DevSecOps efforts are. Well-established metrics that you might want to learn from include:

Deployment frequency – the more frequently you deploy, the greater the indicator of a successful and secure organisation.
Lead time for changes – this shows whether teams are able to deploy changes without getting held up by bureaucratic red tape.
Change failure rate – if you're not experiencing any failures, then you're probably moving too slowly. This indicates how successful your testing coverage is.
Time to restore services – this shows how capable your organisation is at zeroing in on problems and solving them.

Want to level up DevSecOps with value stream management?

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Doing DevSecOps with Adaptavist

DevSecOps consultancy

New to DevSecOps? Don't panic! With our DevSecOps consultancy service, you can lean on our experts. We provide support with:

Planning your DevSecOps strategy from the ground up – a tailored approach to suit your organisation.
Tool integrations and implementation – from security testing to VSM platforms.
Training your developers on new processes and tools to get them up to speed.

DevSecOps assessment

Whatever your starting point, it can be hard to know the state of affairs. Our DevSecOps assessment evaluates your toolchain and processes to understand its maturity and recommend improvements. By the end of the assessment, you will be able to answer these questions:

How mature are my organisation’s DevSecOps competencies?
What level of maturity are we aiming for?
How can we get there?

DevSecOps consultancy

New to DevSecOps? Don't panic! With our DevSecOps consultancy service, you can lean on our experts. We provide support with:

Planning your DevSecOps strategy from the ground up – a tailored approach to suit your organisation.
Tool integrations and implementation – from security testing to VSM platforms.
Training your developers on new processes and tools to get them up to speed.

DevSecOps assessment

How mature are my organisation’s DevSecOps competencies?
What level of maturity are we aiming for?
How can we get there?

DevSecOps resources

Get all the latest insights from our experts.

The changing landscape of DevSecOps part 1: tools and integration

The Head of Solutions Strategy sat with our DevSecOps experts to discuss the current landscape.

READ THE BLOG

The changing landscape of DevSecOps part 2: challenges

The Head of Solutions Strategy sat with our DevSecOps experts to discuss the current landscape.

READ THE BLOG

DevOps Decrypted

DevOps Decrypted focuses on all things Development + Operations, with Adaptavist’s expert staff discussing elements of the philosophy that has changed the world of software development.

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

Our DevOps services

For DevSecOps to succeed, you need a mature DevOps approach in place. If you’re still getting started with DevOps or need support to take things further, we offer a wide range of services to meet your business needs – from maturity assessment and strategy creation to integrating solutions and automating your Atlassian tools.

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Maturity assessment

Training

Strategy and Implementation

Integration solutions

Cloud as a DevOps enabler

Containerisation

Developer experience

DevSecOps technology

Tools alone won’t change anything. To help security to truly shift left and underpin the way you build software, we take a three-pronged approach that addresses people, processes, and technology. Our experts can help you develop a security-first culture, teach the processes to put that thinking into action, and choose the right tools to support its success.

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Our Trusted Partners

GitLab embeds security capabilities and compliance within your DevOps platform, strengthening collaboration and providing end-to-end visibility and control to build, deliver, and run applications.

This open-source one-stop shop includes automated application security testing, an integrated security dashboard to manage vulnerabilities, and threat monitoring for proactive risk analysis and mitigation.

As a Select GitLab Partner, Adaptavist is perfectly positioned to help you make the most of this powerful tool.

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As an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, we’ve got the skills and experience to deploy, run, and manage every aspect of your cloud experience, including your IT infrastructure. With AWS and our support, you can deploy secure end-to-end delivery pipelines with ease. Your security teams can rest easy knowing they won’t be held back by infrastructure issues, helping deliver super-safe software seamlessly to your customers.

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Partner Resources

Top 5 reasons you need GitLab for security

GitLab’s DevOps platform: Helping you with your security and compliance challenges.

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Virtual Security + Compliance Workshop with GitLab

Watch our hands-on workshop with Gitlab to gain a better understanding of how to succeed at security.

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Security as code: The DevSecOps approach

DevOps security programs must evolve if they are to be effective in this next generation of software.

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State of the Software Supply Chain report: Planning tips to combat the biggest cyber threats in 2023

Watch Sonatype's Konstantinos Kiourtsis and Adaptavist's Zbysek Mraz.

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Unlock the power of AWS with Adaptavist

Reach your cloud goals and maximise the benefits of AWS with Adaptavist’s end-to-end cloud services.

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Frequently asked questions

What is DevSecOps?

The term DevSecOps stands for development, security, and operations. It applies security policy and technology to DevOps, transforming your software development lifecycle (SDLC) in the process.

Why is DevSecOps so important?

While IT tools have advanced significantly, those that help with compliance monitoring haven't kept up. That means security engineers can't test code at the same rate developers can build it. With the rise in open source software, vulnerabilities are even more widespread and cybercrime is on the rise too.

Without adequate measures, your organisation is more at risk of serious breaches. Implementing DevSecOps has a direct impact, making security a priority from the outset and ensuring developers have the motivation and training they need to code more securely in the first place.

What is the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps?

DevSecOps is a natural evolution of DevOps thinking. They’ve got lots in common: both require a collaborative culture, embrace automation to speed things up, and monitor data to learn and drive improvements.

But while DevOps focuses more specifically on deploying updates quickly without prioritising threat prevention, DevSecOps addresses security at the outset. It adds some new practices to the mix too, such as incident management, common weaknesses enumeration, automated security testing, and threat modelling.

What are DevSecOps best practices?

Key DevSecOps practices revolve around people, processes, and technology. For your people, you need to invest in skills and knowledge building to encourage a security-first mindset across the organisation – perhaps by installing a security champion on each team – and a more collaborative approach.

Implementing common processes around automation, shifting left with security so it’s embedded as early as possible in the SDLC, and setting and maintaining strict coding standards are all essential for DevSecOps.

Last but not least, the key technology practices underpinning DevSecOps tools are automation – to trigger security tests, for example – testing itself (that might be a mix of static, dynamic, and interaction application testing), and auditing to makes sure your assets meet an internally certified security level.

How to implement DevSecOps?

While no two DevSecOps implementations look the same, there are a number of common processes that will probably be involved to get you on the right track. The key steps we recommend are:

1. Plan – Your plan should set out all the security actions that need to take place across the pipeline, with metrics built-in to help team members take the necessary steps to meet requirements.

2. Develop – Take a look at your existing development approach and research widely to see how it compares to other organisations’. Invest time and resources in training people up and committing to specific practices and code review systems so everyone is on the same page.

3. Build – Introduce automated build tools to speed things up. These tools can help detect vulnerable libraries, replacing them with new ones as you build. Make sure developers don't have to go out of their way to run them or triage results.

4. Test – Incorporating a set of tests into a reliable framework ensures that code and security standards are aligned and vulnerabilities are caught early. Testing practices should include front-end, back-end, database, API, and passive.

5. Deploy – Consistency and speed are key when it comes to deployment, and thanks to infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools, you can achieve both. These tools automate your deployment process, performing the necessary audits and configurations to secure your infrastructure.

6. Operate – Operations teams keep tabs on software and ensure necessary upgrades occur with minimal disruption. DevSecOps makes their lives easier by removing human error from the equation. By utilising IaC tools, they can secure and update infrastructure with ease.

7. Monitor – Speed and efficiency are nothing without constant and continuous monitoring. There are helpful tools to keep on top of this, flagging irregularities to prevent major breaches before they occur.

8. Scale – Make the most of virtualisation tools and cloud deployment to scale your IT and security frameworks rather than wasting money on large data centres and clunky Infrastructure. That way, in the case of a serious threat or breach, you'll be better positioned to manage and resolve it.

Ready for a more secure future?

If you’re interested in implementing DevSecOps but aren’t sure where to start, our expert team is here to help. Get in touch today.