How can you secure your network using DevSecOps?

1 Benefits of DevSecOps

DevSecOps can help you improve your network security in several ways. First, it can help you identify and fix vulnerabilities faster and more efficiently, as you can scan and remediate your code, configurations, and infrastructure as you build and deploy them. Second, it can help you enforce consistent and standardized security policies and practices across your network, as you can use code repositories, pipelines, and templates to manage and audit your security settings and compliance requirements. Third, it can help you foster a culture of collaboration and accountability among your network developers, operators, and security teams, as you can share feedback, metrics, and best practices to continuously improve your security posture and performance.

2 DevSecOps Framework

To implement DevSecOps in your network, you need to follow a framework that covers the following phases: plan, develop, test, deploy, operate, and monitor. In each phase, you need to apply the appropriate security tools and techniques to ensure your network is secure and compliant. For example, during the planning phase, you should define your security objectives, requirements, and standards. You can use threat modeling, risk assessment, and compliance checklists to identify and prioritize risks and controls. Additionally, you can use tools like Jira or Trello to manage security tasks and issues. During the development phase, you should write secure and quality code for applications and services. You can use tools like SonarQube or Snyk to scan code for vulnerabilities or bugs. Automation tools like Ansible or Chef can help with configuring infrastructure and devices. Git or Bitbucket can store and version code and configurations. Testing should be done to ensure network functionality, performance, and security before deployment. Tools like Selenium or JMeter can help with functional testing while Nmap or Metasploit can be used for penetration testing. Nessus or Qualys are great for vulnerability scanning. Deployment should be done securely with tools like Jenkins or Travis CI while Docker or Kubernetes are useful for packaging containers and clusters. Secrets and keys should be stored using HashiCorp Vault or AWS KMS. When operating your network in a production environment, tools like Nagios or Zabbix will help monitor performance while Splunk or ELK Stack are great for collecting logs. Wazuh or OSSEC are useful for intrusion detection. Finally, monitoring should be done continuously with Grafana or Kibana to visualize metrics and alerts while Auditd or Lynis will audit security posture and compliance status. PagerDuty or OpsGenie can notify of security incidents.

3 DevSecOps Best Practices

To make the most of DevSecOps in your network, you need to follow some best practices that can help you enhance your security culture and outcomes. Adopting a shift-left approach, automating as much as possible, embedding security in your network code and infrastructure, and collaborating and communicating across your network teams are all essential. This can help you prevent, detect, and mitigate security issues more effectively and efficiently, improve security speed, accuracy, and consistency, ensure your security is versioned, documented, and traceable, and align security goals and expectations. Ultimately, this will reduce the cost and complexity of fixing issues, reduce human error and bias that can compromise security, enable applying the same development and operations principles to security, and share feedback and insights to learn from successes and failures.

4 DevSecOps Challenges

DevSecOps is not a silver bullet for your network security and comes with some challenges that need to be addressed. Resistance to change is one of them, as DevSecOps requires a shift in mindset, culture, and processes. Communicating the value of DevSecOps and providing necessary training can help with adoption. Complexity and diversity issues such as tool compatibility and conflicting security requirements also need to be managed. Additionally, skill and resource gaps, such as lack of security expertise or budget, must be addressed by investing and allocating resources wisely.

5 DevSecOps Resources

If you want to learn more about DevSecOps and how to apply it to your network, you can explore various resources. The DevSecOps Manifesto is a document that outlines the core values and principles of DevSecOps, such as collaboration, automation, feedback, and learning. The DevSecOps Community is a website that provides various resources and events related to DevSecOps. And the DevSecOps Handbook is a book that provides practical guidance and case studies on how to implement DevSecOps in your organization. These can all be used as references or inspirations for your DevSecOps journey.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?