The Seven Habits of Rugged DevOps

There are several things that one could do with Rugged DevOps. With it, one could leap forward with increased speed and quality by including security practices in an automated lifecycle. Rugged DevOps also comprehend and empathize with goals and make incremental changes that will include remediation automation and security assessment. Moreover, it also helps establish better habits that create cyber security into systems and apps that support them.

Success in DevOps operation could be achieved by practicing the seven habits or rugged DevOps, such as the following:

1. Increase transparency and trust between development, security and operations. IT departments that are structured traditionally struggle in the shift to DevOps because of the stereotypes that operations people, developers and security staff have on one another. Developers are viewed as cowboys who do whatever they want to do. Operations are considered the department of ‘No’ and security is locked into a persistent nagger role. Successful rugged DevOps teams break the stereotyping via exercises in empathy, which in turn could create trust. This begins by understanding what other people are challenged with in their day-to-day lives and speaking those issues when communicating with them. Thus, operations staff and security have to understand the bane of existence for developers is unscheduled, unplanned work. On the other hand, developers and security should remember that operations and infrastructure staff constantly battle performance and downtime glitches. Furthermore, developers and operations staff should recognize that vulnerabilities and breaches are the main issue that security people face. When reaching out, use the right language. Using a common language to understand makes everyone all on the same team, which is a step forward, simple yet important.
2. Comprehend the possibility and impact of certain risks. Security people that want DevOps teams to keep information security concerns top-of-mind should find a better way of getting them to break out of the tunnel vision or their daily work in order to understand how the probability of risk and impacts could affect the software that’s marching its way to production. Meaning that security pros should become better at bringing risk to talks and boosting visibility and knowledge around the certain risk to a business. Consider using real life example and discuss with the team.
3. Eliminate detailed security road maps in favor of incremental enhancements. Just as operations and developers staff have to break away from waterfall projects, security teams should shift away from hugely complex and detailed security road maps if they are going to make a meaningful difference in the DevOps environment. This means establishing a vision and seeking out areas for incremental enhancements instead. This is a mind shift change that should happen.
4. Utilize continuous delivery pipeline to enhance security practices incrementally. One of the DevOps foundations is the continuous delivery pipeline and attendant automated tool chain. The linked tools set for development, integration, testing, deploying and monitoring of code through the lifecycle is the lifeblood of effective continuous delivery and integration process. Security has a real chance of taking advantage of the pipeline to insert security tools in a manner that could boost security metrics steadily.

5. Standardize third-party software and keep updated. The past years were awash in headline-splashing examples of how third-party components in each enterprise software and web assets puts all at risk. DevOps has accelerate the IT shops dependency on third-party software components as agile teams find ways to develop software efficiently without having to reinvent the wheel. However, for shops to truly ruggedize and secure DevOps patterns, there should be some methods. The easiest and best way to make habit is to build a component library.

1. Govern with audit trails that are automated. In contradiction to a lot of security people’s fears, DevOps is not necessarily the Wild West. There are ways of instituting separation of duties and keep tabs of who touches what. It’s a matter of harnessing the power of automated systems put in place within a continuous delivery pipeline. While in most cases the old methods of instituting security approvals has been set aside, the advantage of the tools is that they are all generating audit trails. Security teams should follow a multi-step process of governing with automated audit trails. Create automated security alerts to understand when intrusions occur. The second is work their way back to the requirements phase to prioritize the most sensitive systems for security approvals. Everything else is left to the system to push code through automatically.
2. Test preparedness with security games. This habit is considered the most fun, but is least likely to be practiced. The key is to get developers, security staff and operations all involved and rotating members so everyone will be able to partici8paet on team duties. This could happen regularly or intermittently, but the idea is to utilize findings to do changes to sets of tools and daily practices fixes.

Dhrumit Shukla is Business Development Manager with TatvaSoft - a custom software development company. He writes about Technology Trends, experience working with B2B and B2C clients.