Do you know the most difficult part of deploying and running an application online?
Yes, it’s to protect your system from malicious attacks.
Imagine you launch a new release of your application and you’re excited to see your audience’s response. And then you see your application has been hacked.
That’s embarrassing!
And it’ll be extremely difficult to defend your brand name in that situation.
A last year report states that windows of vulnerability exposure have been increased by 33 percent in one year. And the bad news is, the percentage of companies implementing remediation for this is zero (source).
Another study says that top vulnerabilities remained the same for the last few years, which means hackers don’t require to invent new tricks. In fact, 60 percent of applications had at least one serious and exploitable vulnerability open throughout the year.
Scary, isn’t it?
Well, worry not if you have a highly skilled DevOps team.
A matured DevOps team implement a proper system that can enhance the security of your application.
And how do they do it?
Let’s get to it…
DevOps core task is to speed up the software delivery process without compromising the quality and security of work. To make this happen, DevOps promotes collaboration between teams and reduce the gap between development and operational process.
The key here is to find the information source, collaborate early with the security team and understand the requirements that need to be implemented into the overall solution from the start.
Due to the quick and iterative agile process, handling all the security aspects of an application at once is difficult. And because the software delivery process needs to keep moving, DevOps adds an extra layer in the process called automated security checkpoints.
Automatic security checkpoints ensure that the build goes through a quality check and provide immediate feedback to the stakeholders on security flaws so that proper solution and remedy can be implemented early in the pipeline.
In the traditional approach, servers and instances are given to developers to work on the systems with a golden image. That means, there is a provision developers ensure the server/instances have a hardened operating system. The problem occurs when additional development and configuration activities happen on those servers. DevOps needs to ensure that the servers are provisioned and managed using consistent, repeatable, and reliable patterns. The key here is to manage consistent settings across all environments.
Let’s admit one thing.
No system can be 100% secure. At least not in the case when it’s constantly evolving. DevOps need to monitor all the environments to ensure that they quickly get alerts about potential breaches and security issues, so that they can quickly identify and fix the system, or isolate, shut down the system before someone takes the advantage and exploit the system.
Another important aspect of monitoring is to automatically collect and analyze logs. This helps DevOps to identify issues that need to be fixed as well as provide an automatic collection of compliance evidence.
Thousands of new vulnerabilities released every day in the public domain, so keeping your application security is more difficult than ever before.
The best way is to keep yourself updated with the latest loopholes in technologies. And take advantage of some smart tools to speed up the process and eliminate human error.
And yes, don’t forget to share this post, and let me know in the comment box that how your DevOps team ensure the security of your application.
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