SecOps

What is SecOps ?

The best way to understand SecOps is to first take a look at its better known counterpart, DevOps, and then consider what happens when we bring security into the equation. With DevOps, you aim to move away from a siloed approach where the development team and operations team work independently. Instead, you bring them together, working as a single, cohesive team that can respond better and faster to business challenges. This is done through integration of tools, practices, and goals, with effective tooling and automation at the heart of the process.

Now let’s add security to the consideration. When security is the focus of everyone involved in a project, from compliance to incident response, you start to enter the realm of SecOps. The fundamental idea is that you integrate security considerations into your Dev and Ops teams, automating security tasks across the development lifecycle, increasing accountability, visibility, and response at every stage.

What Are the Goals of SecOps?

Ultimately the goal of SecOps is to improve the security posture of the business, its products, and services by introducing security considerations as a shared responsibility. Building more secure applications means establishing cross-team collaboration, so a major goal of SecOps is to overcome the siloed approach to organizational management. If you already have a DevOps approach, SecOps is a natural bolt-on.

Raising awareness of how security considerations cut across business operations is a major objective. When every member of the team is a “security champion”, your security posture is improved exponentially and in ways that no number of additional staff to your SOC could provide. The goal of SecOps is to ensure that all team members are joining hands across the entire operational playing field.

Automation is the key to simplifying and standardizing security operations. Choose tools with strong and consistent APIs that can be integrated with, and support, your dev, ops and security teams and which can scale as your company or project grows.

Definition of SecOps

SecOps is a methodology that aims to automate crucial security tasks, with the goal of developing more secure applications. The emergence of SecOps is driven in part by the transformation of enterprise infrastructure and IT delivery models as more enterprises are taking advantage of cost-effective cloud computing models and the speed and agility benefits that are gained through the cloud.

SecOps is the practice of fostering a culture where security concerns neither start nor end with the Security team. While a company that shares plaintext passwords will not be using centralized access controls overnight, the process of becoming a SecOps-oriented team begins with making sure the Security team is not siloed and that security concerns are not an afterthought.

SecOps is a software development philosophy and development system. This system is much like the software development system known as DevOps. To understand the development side of SecOps, you first need to understand DevOps. DevOps is the next generation of what is known as the Agile software development method. Over the past decade, “Agile” has been used to manage the acceleration of software versioning and improve the output of many programming teams.

While SecOps shares many of the development practices of both DevOps and Agile, it has an increased focus on security for all involved in the software creation process. This method incorporates greater collaboration between programmers, designers, and those responsible for security to consider threats that could affect users and software during the entire development cycle.

Basic Components of SecOps

In addition to the development procedures most teams are accustomed to, certain augmentations will be added to the process.

Some of these changes include:

• Earlier Analysis: In many organizations, large batches of coding or entire programs are checked for security issues. In SecOps, smaller code segments are routinely checked.
• Increased Transparency: The three components of SecOps (development, security, and operations) are closely tied together with increased collaboration and greater transparency.
• Security Improvements: While DevOps provides incremental improvements to development, SecOps also should steadily improve security alongside programming and operational aspects.
• Threat Awareness: Security teams are well aware of threats, while the rest of the team will likely be less familiar. Training will be required to ensure that everyone shares the same level of understanding.

What Are the Benefits of SecOps?

There are several major business benefits of following the SecOps model. With an improved security posture, you naturally reduce the risks of a data breach, increase response times, and raise consumer confidence in your products and services.

An integrated security approach should also provide better ROI as automation and shared responsibility reduce the need for expensive security measures such as external human analysts and reduce the cost of staffing an ever-expanding SOC team.

With security built in at every stage of the development cycle, you’ll be able to patch faster and more often, ship safer and more stable code, and see a decrease in problem reports and downtime.