DevOps over the years has emerged as one of the most significant IT practices. It has not only helped improve the business models but has even helped developers to take command of product development and operations.
Sticking to the definition, DevOps is the combination of best practices and tools that allows rapid software development and deliveries. However, the methodologies and processes involved in DevOps have unraveled new horizons for business enthusiasts with enhanced client service and overall competitive benefits.
More importantly, DevOps has helped organizations to eradicate all the barriers between development and operation teams allowing enhanced collaborations. Also, the DevOps culture has even helped to upgrade the development lifecycle. It means the DevOps and Agile Testing Services providers can now foster testing right when the development process is started and do not need to wait until the development and deployment phase ends.
Since Governance has always stayed to be an important concern for the IT authorities and organizations internationally, we will aim at highlighting the security factor for all the components of the DevOps model.
Before we dig into the detail of security planning and governance in DevOps model, we believe it is necessary to underline the difference between DevSecOps & DevOps.
Let’s begin!
DevOps & DevSecOps: The Difference
DevOps security or DevSecOps is all about securing the DevOps development lifecycle through the right implementation of processes, tools, and technologies. DevSecOps is a dedicated approach towards security that allows integration of security from inception to deployment.
Unlike traditional software development, DevSecOps allows security fixes to jump into the development lifecycle and does not require waiting until the product completes its design and testing stages, which is better than DevOps.
In the case of DevOps, the security testing is done a little late and therefore was unable to align with the rapidity requirement on modern systems. And therefore, DevSecOps was introduced to compensate for the delays and ensure security in the IT systems.
DevSecOps involve security engineers working closely with DevOps teams to identify and fill the security gaps. It means DevSecOps allows security testing at every iteration allowing quick mitigation of the security vulnerabilities and threats.
Nevertheless, embosoming the DevOps principles is necessary for keeping pace with the technology revolution. And therefore, it becomes even more important to drive the governance model into the DevOps culture using Automation.
Let us now quickly jump on understanding the five most significant components of security structure for the DevOps model with an automation-based governance model:
Automation In Security Compliance Architecture
When it comes to Automation, it is considered as both a threat and benefit to security. Often considered as the last step of the governance model, Automation of security processes in Infrastructure as a code and Security as a code architecture offers greater bandwidth for quality and risk-free operations. Therefore, adding automation to design of security architecture becomes essential to cut off the vulnerabilities.
Especially, when testers and developers often have to deal with the stress of hacking attempts while working on a cloud platform, an automated security architecture could turn out to be an effective decision around the risk profile of an organization. Besides, every organization, say banking, retail, or manufacturing have their own approach towards automation, cloud, and DevOps, it becomes necessary to customize the architecture based on the varying risk profiles.
Also, the quality assurance services must ensure that the compliance sits well on the defined architecture. Such an approach could help reflect on the reference architecture without compromising on the security benchmarks and services catalog.
Automation Of Data Insights
Once you have a well-defined strategy to work on DevOps with security architecture, the next big step that you need to take on the governance model is to develop insights on the cloud resources in use. This usually needs reassessing the costs involved with an on-prem data center as the cloud makes it more convenient for you to manage bills and budget.
Cloud does not need to keep a check on hardware assets or factors like electricity consumption. Rather it allows easy resource sharing which makes it even more crucial to have an automated governance model that can help measure and control resources.
One way to achieve that proficiency is to have a dashboard and reporting tool that can measure the consumption metrics of the cloud model. The other way to meet such goals is to work on a cloud management platform that can provide insights on consumption, trends, and optimization scenarios for data usage.
Continuous System Services Monitoring
As DevOps requires rapid identification of risks and compliance-related flaws, it is necessary that developers and DevOps & Agile testing services must track the system health for all the activities. Though most cloud providers have an in-built process to monitor the system capabilities, integrating third-party tools like Alert logic or Splunk could offer great help in monitoring the logged data.
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Besides, it is equally important to have a check on the system at the application level to identify any performance or security issues in advance. Therefore, it is necessary to accommodate a governance model that contains automation tools that can standardize resolutions for system-specific or process-specific issues.
Automated Provisioning
One of the best things about bringing automation to the provisioning process is speedy. The early adopters of cloud provisioning automation or popularly known as fast movers are found to be taking half the time for the provisioning of virtual systems as compared to the followers or late-adopters.
However, it is necessary that the governance model for your DevOps strategy should incorporate ready-made templates and scripts for rapid automation of provisioning while sticking to the cloud-design principles. Such a measured approach could help developers and cloud testing services to prevent any under or over-provisioning. Also, automated provisioning when done effectively using a cloud management portal or third-party tool could help foster the right DevOps environment.
Sticking To CI/CD Approach
Though it may appear to be an out-of-context practice, CI/CD integration is directly associated with automated provisioning and DevOps governance. Though CI/CD when worked through effective and precise use of scripts, can help reduce the time to deploy code, bringing CI/CD tools into the scene demands automated build tools, unit test, source code repository, configuration, provisioning, and deployment, all via integrated workflow.
These tools and actions are essential to driving standardization in the automation environment while cutting manual errors. Also, having access to all these tools can help with predictability and improve the speed of the process. More importantly, the use of the CI/CD tool repository, automation provisioning, and all the above steps could help log every step for a quick audit of the workflow in the DevOps environment and add overall transparency to CI/CD pipeline.
The Crux
Apart from the above-defined 5 components of the DevOps automation governance model, it is equally important that every organization working on the DevOps model should aim at expanding the team working on Cloud Ops governance. This must need organizations to hire cloud testers, developers, and involve operational executives to ensure solid change management in the overall process.
Also, centralized cloud governance could even help to simplify all the tasks surrounding account provisioning, establishing the network, shared services hosting, cost management, and security auditing. Such an approach could help control cloud resources and can even aid processing workloads and security parameters.
All in all, it is necessary to understand how DevOps has helped changed the process for development and operations in order to incorporate security into the already existing DevOps philosophy. Therefore, sticking to the above steps of planning the governance model could help organizations to enjoy the best of DevOps without compromising speed and costs. Especially, when DevOps and DevSecOps have the potential to aid development lifecycle with all the scalability and security, adhering to compliance and governance regulations is everything that the world needs to witness futuristic transformations.
All the best!
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