The DevSecOps Digest: Integrating Security in Full Stack Development

The development field is expanding in its own way, like isn’t it amazing we see a lot of changes technically motivated changes everywhere? Irrespective of these challenges technically advanced practices also raise some severe concerns regarding process security. The market of full stack development is continuously increasing and making advancements from the market perspective. And dealing with the same sort of problem the concept of DevSecOps was introduced to the market. This methodology integrates security practices within the DevOps process. The aim of this approach is to make security an integral part of the project development process instead of being an individual one. DevSecOps is completely different from the traditional software development process. As in this security considerations are built into the development process. In other words, it makes sure to run a smooth collaboration between development, operations, and security teams along with different advanced practices. Which are automated monitoring and continuous monitoring for the detection as well as solution of the security issues. In this context the research data by Technavio highlights the same aspect.

As shown in the above figure, the market size of DevSecOps was valued at USD 1176.40 million in 2017. Which is expected to grow to USD 7577.43 million by 2027. This represents a compound annual growth rate of 29.53% between the timeframe of 2022 to 2027. This shows how this market is continuously increasing and raising the concern of in-built security concerns within the product development lifecycle. 

In this newsletter, we will work on highlighting the major concepts of the DevSecOps process. Let's explore this informational newsletter to raise awareness of full-stack development security issues.

Best Practices of Integrating DevSecOps in Full-Stack Development

You can not just dump a buggy code into the production, which can result in a bad consumer experience and potential loss to business due to downtime. The current times are full of cyber-attacks and can be present and affect your business in many ways. So to stay protected from all these software development lifecycle (SDLC) itself needs to be secured. So learn about the integrating steps of DevSecOps further.

• Creation of DevOps Culture

The formation of a successful DevSecOps process requires one to integrate security in every stage. This differs from one organization to another organization. For introducing a DevSecOps culture within any organization one should include factors like people, processes, products and governance. The people factor is concerned with removing different disciplines and focusing on developing a naturally collaborative environment. The process factor works for making security practices as an in-built instead of opting for it at the end of SDLC. The product factor focuses on making the DevOps toolchain fully automated with CI/CD for the identification of security issues. Lastly, the governance factors work on integrating continuous improvement in the central DevSecOps. This requires a culture of measurement enabling practitioners to identify various opportunities.

• Design of Security Within the Product

This process works towards the establishment of security practices within the product from the initial planning stages to production-level support. In other words, security work is planned alongside the designing of the product development features. In this step, we plan to execute security practices every day as a part of the team’s workload.

• Formation of Threat Modeling Practice

We can identify any security issues or vulnerabilities even before writing a line of code. The development team is subjected to model these potential issues during the planning phase and should work on designing the architecture to mitigate these security issues effectively. Along with this, the full stack development team can opt for periodic penetration testing, in which a trusted person is subjected to test the developed project to point out the weaknesses that are missing within the threat models.

• Automation for Security & Speed

The concept of automation is utilized in many fields and now software security has become one. In this automation testing is integrated to identify any security issues that are not running within the application. This makes sure that the security checks get performed on time and gives developers more time to focus on major features rather than solving issues. These automated testing processes need to follow certain principles. This automation should be strategic, not completely dissolving the creativity of the developers. And focusing on conducting systematic code reviews. The automation testing process has code scanning, vulnerability scanning, and secret scanning.

• Addition of Security Checkpoints In SDLC

The development phase is considered the most complex as well as the most easy part. In this, the development team needs to decide the transition points of the SDLC where the risk profile have the tendency to change. This point can be the code merging stages to their main code branch. This can increase the code's potential to be run on the machines and opens the chances to eventually reach the production state. This situation can be managed with the help of opening of pull request that can be treated as a good trigger event for automated security checks. 

• Treatment of Security Failures as Learning

Building the full stack development culture of continuous development can result in many benefits. This makes DecSecOps security issues a learning opportunity. For this one can follow the steps like analyzing the audit logs, formation of incident reports, and modeling the malicious behavior to improve tooling, testing, and processes to further secure the developed product. This makes the process of the development project self-sustained.

• Building Analytical Capabilities

The concept of continuous monitoring is considered a critical part of the DevSecOps practice. This involves real-time alerts, system analytics, and highly active threat monitoring. While maintaining all the data records of the application and DevSecOps pipeline, one can create a united conclusion for the application’s health. In this process, the dashboard reports and early highlights of issues can help a lot. When any problem comes up with security issues,  these solutions provide insights for the resolution and root cause analysis of it.

Conclusion

The development of software is continuously increasing in the marketplace and is bringing many changes within this environment. But when we consider security, the full-stack applications are not that secure. This is considered a severe issue of the SDLC and not managing it can result in major implications. DevSecOps offers a security framework for creating a secure software even from its initial DevOps phase. In this, we focus on building on the well-understood culture and processes of DevOps means. That further shifts DevSecOps as a natural evaluation. 

Embracing continuous innovation, Amplework keeps on adding new technologies to its software development services. Serving the market for more than 5+ years, we focus on application security concerns on a priority basis. So choose us for DevSecOps-enabled full-stack development services.

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