The Top DevSecOps Trends Driving Digital Transformation

DevSecOps improves upon DevOps practices by baking security into development and operations workflows. Many organizations are starting to adopt DevSecOps in response to rising cybersecurity threats from supply chain attacks and Infrastructure as Code vulnerabilities. Other teams who have already been practicing DevSecOps are also adopting new technologies and development approaches to accelerate their digital transformation efforts further.

Let’s look at the top DevSecOps trends driving adoption and digital transformation.

Top DevSecOps Trends

Current DevSecOps trends include:

An Increasing Number of Supply Chain Attacks

A supply chain attack is when cybercriminals breach your systems by compromising a third-party partner or exploiting a vulnerability in third-party code. These attacks increased by more than 300% in 2021, with most cybercriminals exploiting open source vulnerabilities, code integrity issues, and insecure software supply chain processes to breach enterprise networks. Since large software projects typically rely on several hundred external libraries and components, there are several hundred potential supply chain vulnerabilities.

The best way to prevent supply chain attacks is to integrate security checks at every step of the build, delivery, and deployment processes with DevSecOps. By scanning new dependencies as soon as they’re integrated, you can ensure vulnerabilities are found and patched before they make it into production.

In addition, a robust Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) program will help you evaluate the risk involved in working with particular software vendors to minimize the risk of supply chain attacks further.

Wider Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Adoption

Infrastructure as Code, or IaC, uses programmatic code to provision new environments, reducing the need for manual configurations. IaC is becoming a staple of DevOps because it speeds up resource provisioning and allows greater collaboration between developers and sysadmins. However, many administrators lack experience working with declarative or imperative IaC programming, increasing human error risk. Mistakes in IaC configurations could lead to infrastructure being created with security vulnerabilities.

DevSecOps bakes security scans into the infrastructure provisioning pipeline, so admins can find and fix vulnerabilities in IaC configurations before environments are deployed. Post-deployment, continuous security monitoring will help quickly catch any new or existing vulnerabilities so they can be patched before they’re exploited. Beyond security, DevSecOps shifts functional, and quality tests left, ensuring sysadmins can provide developers with the exact resources needed to run code optimally – even when requirements change unexpectedly.

Growing Reliance on AIOps

Software requirements, infrastructure architectures, and cyber threats are growing more complex and sophisticated. Therefore, enterprises are increasingly relying on AIOps – artificial intelligence for IT operations. DevSecOps teams use AIOps to quickly analyze large quantities of data, primarily for infrastructure and security monitoring.

AIOps is adept at analyzing event logs and other useful data to identify the root cause of infrastructure issues – and sometimes automatically remediate problems – in real time. Additionally, AIOps security tools use advanced machine learning algorithms to detect cybersecurity threats with fewer false positives than traditional signature-based systems. AIOps is also better at catching novel attacks because it can analyze a potential threat using previous data input and prior experience to extrapolate its danger to your network.

Shifting to Cloud Native Development

The cloud native approach focuses on designing and building software for cloud environments from the ground up. Cloud native software is typically deployed as microservices in a containerized environment. Therefore, it can take advantage of cloud-based architectures' scalability, resiliency, and speed. Many DevSecOps teams are adopting a cloud native approach because it accelerates digital transformation.

Cloud native software is highly scalable because containers and microservices can be independently scaled to add or delete resources as necessary. It’s also very resilient because an individual container or microservice can fail without taking down the rest of the node. Finally, cloud native development is extremely agile because microservices applications are developed modularly, supporting the fast and iterative releases required for DevSecOps. 

Streamline Your DevSecOps Adoption with Copado Strategic Services

Whether you’re just starting your DevSecOps journey or looking for ways to improve existing practices, the experts at Copado Strategic Services can help you achieve success.