Tooling is not the only thing that will help you in your DevSecOps journey. Here are some helpful tips that can help you address security risks and have a more secure culture within your organization.
Adopt a DevSecOps culture
Adopting a DevSecOps approach is critical in implementing modern DevOps. Therefore, it is vital to embed security within an organization’s culture. You can achieve that by implementing effective communication and collaboration between the development, operations, and security teams. While most organizations have a security policy, it mustn’t be followed just to comply with rules and regulations. Instead, employees should cross-skill and upskill themselves to adopt a DevSecOps approach and embed security early on during development. Security teams need to learn how to write code and work with APIs, while developers need to understand security and use automation to achieve this.
Establish access control
You have heard about the Principle of Least Privilege (PoLP) several times in this book. Well, that is what you need to implement for a better security posture, which means you should make all attempts to grant only the required privileges to people to do their job, and nothing more. Reduce the just-in-case syndrome by making the process of giving access easier so that people don’t feel hindered, and as a result, they do not seek more privileges than they require.
Implement shift left
Shifting left means embedding security into software at the earlier stages of software development. This means security experts need to work closely with developers to enable them to build secure software right from the start. The security function should not be review-only but should actively work with developers and architects to develop a security-hardened design and code.
Manage security risks consistently
You should accept risks, which are inevitable, and should have a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) should an attack occur. You should have straightforward and easy-to-understand policies and practices from a security standpoint in all aspects of software development and infrastructure management, such as configuration management, access controls, vulnerability testing, code review, and firewalls.
Implement vulnerability scanning
Open source software today is snowballing, and most software implementations rely on ready-made open source frameworks, software libraries, and third-party software that don’t come with a guarantee or liability of any kind. While the open source ecosystem is building the technological world like never before, it does have its own share of vulnerabilities, which you don’t want to insert within your software through no fault of your own. Vulnerability scanning is crucial, as scans can discover any third-party dependency with vulnerabilities and alert you at the initial stage.