DevOps vs. DevSecOps: What is the difference?

Aashna Diwan
Successive Digital
Published in
3 min readAug 24, 2021

Beyond the economic jeopardy of high regulatory non-compliance penalties resulting from falling prey to a data breach, every corporation has to protect the sensitive data of their customers and representatives. If they fail to do so, they not only violate the law but, crucially, put their reputation at stake by compromising trust. The most practical approach to recognize security vulnerabilities is to inquire about software for potential frailties and treat them before a product goes to market. However, up until recently, security testing has been deprioritized by software delivery companies. This is an addition to circumstances such as time pressure and a central focus on delivering innovative and user-friendly products to stay ahead of the competition. However, times are changing. In recent years, there has been a progressive transformation in mindset around security within the DevOps community. Since its initiation, a core element of DevOps is consistently delivering value to the customer rapidly. The teams have started taking more accountability for establishing security testing within the continuous testing process to overlook potential security weaknesses.

DevSecOps is now prompting a significant transformation in IT culture. Meanwhile, DevOps continues to remodel industries focusing on “shifting left” to deliver more applications promptly and with less downtime. For many companies, the simultaneous growth of both methodologies raises a question: What’s the difference? How do these two approaches protrude, and where do they deviate? Here’s the breakdown.

What is DevOps?

DevOps collaborates with developers and operations teams to create a more agile, efficient, and streamlined deployment framework. It can also be termed a philosophical approach that aims to develop a culture of collaboration between isolated teams. To deliver software and services more reliably and promptly to market with fewer requests for revision, DevOps has become a driving force in many growing organizations.

DevSecOps: The Next Big Thing

DevSecOps presents the concept of information security (InfoSec) into the existing DevOps model. Since the initiation of an SDLC, DevSecOps makes the application secure by proposing various security techniques. Besides, it integrates essential security policies like code analysis, compliance monitoring, threat investigation, and other vulnerabilities assessments into typical DevOps workflows. In this way, the native security gets built into new product deployments and mitigates the risk of flaws and software errors.

DevOps vs. DevSecOps: Fundamental Differences

‘Speed’ is the most significant driver of DevOps. However, moving processes left and establishing automation makes it convenient to test new products, design improvements, and start repeatedly. But sometimes, speed is considered an enemy of security and is very close to the chances of happening risk. Here comes DevSecOps: executing most high-grade practices that lessen the entire corporate risks. The transition from DevOps to DevSecOps can be uncertain as developers require more speed and security; on the other hand, they need time to guarantee critical vulnerabilities that are not being neglected. The security perspectives of the software are increasingly core to its functionality. Ultimately, regardless of the terminology, security needs to be the main element of software delivery. While implementing security for every business model kind of policy can help decrease the overall risk factors. Moreover, the key distinction between the two methodologies is the skillsets, which means that security implementation ultimately rests with InfoSec pros. Objectives.

Conclusion

As enterprises are evolving their IT culture to DevOps by focusing on rapid service delivery by adopting agile and lean practices. At Successive Technologies, we build consultative solutions that enable clients to secure product development with DevSecOps capabilities. We enable teams to inject comprehensive application security testing at the right time, at the right depth, with the right tools and processes, and with the right experience. Contact our DevSecOps Architects to know more.

--

--

Aashna Diwan
Successive Digital

An Engineer who now happens to be a Technical Content Writer. I create insightful content about next-gen technologies like AI, Blockchain, IoT, Cloud, AR/VR etc