What is DevSecOps? 7 Differences Between DevOps and DevSecOps?

Businesses aim to manage their software development life cycle better. They hope to integrate better efficiency, shared ownership, workflow automation, and improved collaboration to ensure timely delivery, reduced risks, and superior quality. DevOps is one process that can complement this beautifully. However, it’s not the only one, as DevSecOps is now becoming increasingly popular.

According to Verified Market Research, the DevSecOps market size will reach $41.66 billion by 2030 and the DevOps market size will touch $20.01 billion by 2026. The growing demand for faster delivery while staying agile to serve customers and gain a competitive advantage has led businesses to explore both. DevSecOps and DevOps may sound similar, but are they really? Let’s find out.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the amalgamation of Development (Dev) and Operations (Op). It is when people, processes, and technology come together to provide top-tier value to customers. The DevOps practices, culture, and tools enable better coordination and collaboration between IT operations, engineering, and security teams to deliver quality products and higher customer satisfaction. Microservices, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), and Policy as Code (PaC) are the key components of DevOps.

The DevOps culture of minimal silos enables higher agility to disruptions through better planning, development, delivery, and operations. Also, better stability and reliability help improve the time to recovery. Furthermore, better visibility, higher accountability, shorter release cycles, and continuous learning accelerate, automate, and produce seamless workflows and better productivity. Therefore DevOps adoption is even more considered by developers and companies all over the globe.

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps combines development, security, and operations. DevSecOps incorporates security in every phase of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC), allowing security to take precedence and not get isolated till the final stage. The “Shift Left” proactive security approach automates patching, testing, and encryption to secure and protect the software end-to-end from vulnerabilities.

Infusing security into the Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) pipeline helps to detect and address security threats early. Threat experts, engineers, compliance professionals, development teams, and operations resources work to check the source code, design flaws, detect runtime vulnerabilities, and provide insights to accelerate remediation efforts.

Similarities between DevOps and DevSecOps?

Automation:

DevOps and DevSecOps recognize the need to incorporate automation to accelerate the development process. The goal is to minimize human touches in tedious, error-ridden, and repetitive tasks and make the workflow more efficient and seamless. Automation, in both, helps with incident responses, policy setting, and accomplishing more tasks with fewer resources.

In DevOps, automation helps to ensure a seamless workflow to reach delivery faster. DevSecOps looks to automate regular security checks to detect high-risk threats. DevSecOps integrates automated security tasks into the Continuous Integration (CI)/Continuous Delivery (CD) pipelines. This simplifies laborious testing procedures to be more time-efficient and less resource hungry.

Collaboration:

DevOps and DevSecOps value communication and collaboration to ensure teams work effortlessly throughout every phase of the development cycle. Rapid development with minimal iterations and quick deployment through consistent updates, round-the-clock feedback, and the highest transparency ensures the best productivity out of your team.

A centralized platform to access and share information means no actor will ever be in the dark – data silos won’t creep up. From senior leaders to members lower in the hierarchy, all have the absolute best visibility from planning to production. The collaborative culture exists to promote efficiency, reduce bottlenecks, and streamline development.

Constant Monitoring:

Proactive gathering, assessing, and acting on pivotal information is common to DevOps and DevSecOps. It helps to detect any anomaly sooner than later in the development pipeline. The active inspection makes it easier to weed out the irregularity and its dependent variables, through clean code, without losing a lot of time and money.

Active monitoring in DevOps helps to improve efficiency and quality while reducing cost; this can involve testing in the production environment. DevSecOps too follows the same principle to detect malicious threats and unauthorized entry. Real-time detection helps to fix vulnerabilities, upgrade the performance, tighten the code, and patch the software.

Differences between DevOps and DevSecOps?

Security Start:

In DevOps, security issues get addressed towards the end of the development pipeline, leading to missed vulnerabilities or untested code. DevSecOps, on the other hand, follows a continuous security process from the get-go – security testing begins during the build process. In DevSecOps, security is an ongoing principle for the early detection of threats.

Team Collaboration:

DevOps leaves security till the end and focuses primarily on seamless collaboration – all through the development and deployment process. Rarely do preliminary developers bother about security issues and get tied up with the security experts that evaluate the software in the later stages. DevSecOps, on the other hand, endorses security practices that enable and foster a more collaborative approach between the developers, operations, and security teams.

Risk Ownership:

DevSecOps commits to security through shared responsibility. Everyone involved plays a crucial role in balancing security and development. In DevSecOps, everyone involved shares the security decision, from experts to early developers. In DevOps, the development teams often follow unreliable practices outside the influence of the security teams. Practices like reusing third-party code, leaving embedded credentials, etc., heighten risk at the cost of speed, something that security experts have to rectify or return for a redo.

Speed:

DevOps focuses more on speed and efficiency than DevSecOps. The goal is to close the project through improved collaboration and communication between the team. Security doesn’t come up sooner, and a faster finish takes precedence. DevOps hopes to speed up software delivery, whereas DevSecOps balances security and speed to deliver secure apps as quickly as possible. DevSecOps is all about the swift development of a safe and compliant codebase.

Feedback:

DevOps favors continuous forward momentum from the development teams, and the level of security-related feedback is less. From deployment to integration, there is no wait time – leaving no room for delays. DevSecOps values Continuous feedback, meaning monitoring, reporting, and requisite remedial actions. Security is not an afterthought; teams coordinate and participate in a continuous feedback loop to ensure code vulnerabilities are detected and addressed earlier.

Use of Tools:

In DevSecOps, the tools serve to streamline security protocols. The tools automate tests that would otherwise invest resources in lengthy wasteful activities and delay the release. Tools used in DevOps help improve productivity, aid efficiency, and release code into the subsequent stages faster. Since DevOps values speed and detest latency more than anything, the idea remains to achieve more in a short amount of time through a reliable continuous delivery pipeline.

Time savings and Overall Cost:

The cost savings, overall investment dollars, and incremental returns are somewhat better in the DevSecOps methodology. Embracing security earlier in the SDLC results in developers catching vulnerabilities in the initial stages, leading to corresponding solutions to patch and fix the issue. In DevOps, finding any security risks and loophole late can lead to an extended timeline to fix the problem, which will add to the costs and potentially delay the release.

Transitioning from DevOps to DevSecOps

From integrating technology to revising culture, organizations need to create a synergy of people and security tools to realize more value from the transition. In DevSecOps, security becomes a shared responsibility of the whole team resulting in better cycle time and effectiveness. When shifting left, companies focus their time, effort, and investments on security.

Companies can increase security experts who follow the best practices, initiate security protocols at every stage, and automate tests through AI capabilities. Conduct security tests like Static Application Security Testing, Software Composition Analysis, Dynamic Application Security Testing, Interactive Application Security Testing, etc.

• Setup security guidelines during onboarding
• Make security requirements part of coding standards
• Include checkpoints on testing – security forms a part of the dev and test activities
• Build incrementally, test gradually, and increase feedback loops

Future of DevOps and DevSecOps

DevOps was maturing and doing well in speed, agility, and quality. For businesses that valued quicker delivery and early time to market, DevOps was the go-to approach. Shorter development cycles combined with continuous delivery paved the way for a methodology that improved efficiency and increased deployment frequency. Until DevSecOps came along.

DevSecOps applied security measures such as Build-time, Test-time, and Deploy-time checks. Threat Modeling, Incident Management, automated testing, and other safeguards helped to avoid security lapses. From pure DevOps to integrating security into the software development process resulted in the natural progression of DevOps into DevSecOps. The ability to elevate security has made the shift toward DevSecOps inevitable.

Wrapping Up

DevSecOps is quite like DevOps, except security doesn’t take a backseat. DevSecOps methodology takes the DevOps philosophy to the next level and makes security an integral part of the development cycle. DevSecOps is a must-have for projects that value security, cost-effective budgets, and an efficient finish with minimal iterations and code changes from security flaws.

Remodeling your existing process without professional know-how can see disastrous consequences. Whether you wish to level up your DevOps practices or move to DevSecOps, effective enablement and change management requires a team of qualified experts. At ISHIR, we help to develop a robust DevOps or DevSecOps roadmap for more efficiency and growth in sync with your business model.

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