5 Common Mistakes Organizations Make While Implementing DevSecOps (and how to avoid them!)

The accelerated adoption of digitalization provides great benefits for businesses in the new normal. However, it comes with its own set of challenges. For instance, cybersecurity is a growing concern today. Many businesses are reassessing their development processes to make their products and services more secure. Data security is not just a norm anymore — it has become a key differentiating factor.

These evolving market shifts have led many businesses to practice DevSecOps. Digital transformation and faster software development processes mean that security needs to be more flexible and reliable. To meet the security demands of modern application and software development, businesses must embrace DevSecOps as an essential component of corporate AppSec strategies.

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DevSecOps entails planning for application and infrastructure security from the beginning. It also entails automating some security gates in order to keep the DevOps workflow moving. Choosing the correct tools for continuous security integration, such as agreeing on an integrated development environment (IDE) with security capabilities, can assist fulfill these objectives. But we have seen organizations make some common mistakes when they try to set up their DevSecOps processes, which can lead to problems that were not expected. Let’s look at the top five most common errors we’ve seen recently.

Unplanned Automation

Despite its relevance in DevSecOps, organizations have a hazy approach to automation. Almost all security vendors today provide native pipeline connections, making scanning relatively simple. DevSecOps is defined as simply initiating scans within pipelines in an automated manner, with little concern paid to the optimal stage of SDLC where the scans will be launched.

In many cases, the automatic response is to scan and validate each piece of code uploaded to the repository for vulnerabilities, with no concern for long-term sustainability. Such approaches tend to limit developers. DevSecOps cannot exist without developers.

How you can avoid: Automate security testing following a study of app requirements and agreement with development teams on the optimal approach. Keeping development teams out of automation is detrimental to DevSecOps’ long-term success.

Scanner misconfiguration

Most security vendors and providers use a reactive customer support strategy, focusing on customer inquiries rather than proactively enhancing the customer’s environment-specific solution. It is often surprising how much the quality of findings can improve with a better arrangement. A considerable reduction in the number of false positives is extremely likely, which is critical for decreasing friction with development teams.

How you can avoid: Before automating pipeline scans, configure the scanners to reduce the number of vulnerabilities. Security and development teams must eliminate hundreds or thousands of irrelevant vulnerabilities in the absence of adequate settings.

Overlooking that DevSecOps is a work culture

DevSecOps requires strong collaboration across security, development, and DevOps teams. Otherwise, it will not achieve the desired results. Disagreements between development and security teams are common in the IT world; each side blames the other of wasting time by alerting them to false positive security issues or failing to fix genuine security issues on time. This is especially true when the security team operates in siloes and makes decisions without notifying the development or DevOps teams about the benefits of DevSecOps for higher-quality applications.

How you can avoid: All stakeholders should attend planning meetings to agree on methods, metrics, and KPIs. Only then can involved people be held accountable for failing to follow agreed-upon regulations.

Improper tooling

Under the pressure of starting an AppSec program, AppSec teams often spend a lot of money on expensive tools without doing thorough research to see how the product fits with their goals, hoping that the tools will push them in the right direction. They set the methods based on the capabilities of the chosen tools, which is in contrast to the vendor-agnostic approach required in DevSecOps. Tools change over time. Rather than building new procedures every time a new tool is introduced, it is best to select tools based on previously agreed-upon processes.

How you can avoid: Open source security solutions in specific programming languages and settings reduce the need to rush into a commercial product and help build processes at a lower cost. A one-size-fits-all approach does not work in DevSecOps; to have good tooling, one must understand the technology stack and how the development teams work.

Lack of metrics

“How secure are we?” is the most challenging IT question to answer due to a lack of metrics. It is difficult to demonstrate the ROI of AppSec programs because organizations are constantly assessing success. You can’t assess your security posture or program’s effectiveness without well-thought-out metrics.

How you can avoid: Key stakeholders should be involved in defining key performance indicators (KPIs) for each indicator and providing metrics like time to respond or fix a vulnerability. DevSecOps is a marathon, not a sprint. It is crucial for organizations to have a clear understanding of what’s working well and which areas need improvement.

Conclusion

There is little doubt that guaranteeing application security is now a must-have for any organization that develops its own software. With data breaches and malware outbreaks on the rise, using risky software can quickly become prohibitively expensive. Using DevSecOps is one method for incorporating security into the web development pipeline. Whichever term and procedure you use, the essential thing is that it works continually for your specific requirements. Since DevSecOps is a relatively new process and organizations are still getting used to the approach, there’s no one right way to ensure success with it. The common goal is to make security a process with continuous enhancements. It’s critical to understand that DevSecOps is a continuous practice and not just a one-time activity, and one way to make security more flexible is to embed security testing into your SDLC.

As a value-driven software provider, Technogise emphasizes the importance of ensuring security across all processes. Reach out to our experts to learn more about the effective implementation of the DevSecOps approach.