What is DevOps, DevSecOps, DevEverythingOps & Why Even Care

Reducing it to an elevator pitch, DevOps is a complex of collaborative development practices that center around improving software quality while dramatically cutting rollout time. What is one key purpose of DevOps? It’s exactly making the engineering process seamless and dynamic.

Technique-wise, DevOps grounds on continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD), alongside comprehensive automation. Within combined development, IT operations, and QA efforts, DevOps teams create a consistent production environment. Everyone can freely communicate to better control the delivery process, making it predictable and sustainable.

Also promoting close cross-team collaboration, DevSecOps harbors a set of methods for engineering, security, and operations teams. The critical mission here is to ensure ironclad software sanity throughout the entire development lifecycle, up to release. The thing is, before agile approaches emerged, it was quite a common practice to test software security at the very end of the engineering cycle.

Just imagine. You’ve made it through all the development phases and whoop — your code’s overall safety goes puff in your face. Meaning, all hands on deck and back to fixing costly vulnerabilities and breaches. So, it’s either messing up the release deadline or pressure delivering flawed code, both too bad to make peace with.

And yes, DevSecOps is quite a silver lining in this. To never put your software in harm’s way and detect smoke signals right on the go, teams integrate security practices within the whole SDLC, from conception, architecture development, and design all the way to QA, delivery, and deployment.

To cover all the bases, let’s define DevEverythingOps. Essentially, it implies optimizing all development and operational activities to build a purposeful flawless solution. Think of it as yet another kind of tech environment with a shared responsibility to reach goals iteratively, faster. 

Within DevEverythingOps, no one is a man of their own, not a single flaw creeps in to kill the vibe of airtight security and control. Each member of the team banks on fast and effective processes in line with the “rising tide lifts all boats” principle. Each party of the project equally matters — from customers to engineers, as they all collaborate in the name of successful release.

Further, let’s get into the specifics of DevSecOps vs DevOps.

No secret that DevSecOps and DevOps have much in common. Namely, both the practices underlie strong automation, collaboration, and continuous data monitoring. Also, each of the approaches relies on AI tools to automate the SDLC — from auto-complete code all the way to autonomous security audit. 

DevOps teams strive to be proactive and predictable in feature releases, while DevSecOps drives secure real-time data updates and improvements by detecting anomalies and vulnerabilities early on. To quickly achieve project goals without wrecking deliverables’ quality, both methodologies value teamwork and utmost visibility.

Shorter cycles, increased software resilience — these are the DevOps pillars from a tech standpoint. The team has common objectives, tools, and major performance indicators. Yet, the focus on seamless UX updates can jeopardize security of app data and infrastructure. 

And this is exactly how DevSecOps is different from DevOps — it just rules out stocking a roomful of vulnerabilities up to the pipeline’s end. Ultimately security-driven, DevSecOps employs safe coding to limit the potential attack surface before introducing products to the user.

Now that we know a thing or two about the DevSecOps magic, let’s dig further. So why do we switch to those beautiful security practices?

Highly likely, security testing isn’t a dream activity for most developers. Yet, this isn’t a “try better next time” story. Cybersecurity is a thing for all times, and it should be really addictive. Need we say, its landscape continuously evolves, as ill-minded hacking wizards never sleep.

With “fake it till you make it” as their motto and “mercy” being out of their vocabularies, they’re doing their plotting, scheming, and conspiring business non-stop. We seasoned tech insiders go like “You can’t get us, we’ve seen boatloads like you before!” And they go like “Huh, try me.”

The thing is, what went off without a hitch years before doesn’t fit anymore, even if it’s still seemingly working. And here DevSecOps comes in to reduce the tension from towers of manual checks while efficiently prepping code for production. Okay, how do we get to grips with it?

First, examine your pipelines and verify code dependencies. Second, clearly set project goals. Third, reach out for experts to train your development team. It should be educated on both the most common and the trickiest cybersecurity issues while learning how to avoid them via secure coding methods. 

Typically, one stumbles upon cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and the likes. Once you learn to handle these common issues, you get immediate value and move to advanced problems. Now, ask yourself whether your existing code signing policies are correct, as they are basically the backbone to DevSecOps.

And you’d be surprised how many companies mispractice code signing. Remember — all of your drivers, apps, tools, and deliverables are to be verified by a standalone digital signature prior to progressing further within the SDLC. It’s nothing but a key to code integrity.

By using the same key across disparate projects, product lines, and files, one puts their security to an enormous risk. Meaning, it’s critical to establish harsh code signing control and reporting at each development stage. And God forbid loading a key onto a thumb drive — this is literally crazy.

What is DevSecOps and DevOps, besides collaboration and safety? It’s also consistent automation. On top of extending better security practices across CI/CD pipelines, these practices give a boatload of confidence by taking mind-blowingly complex burdens off your shoulders. Just pick the right tech and set up easily scalable mechanisms of signing code binaries.

Executing key processes through the cloud? Think of a code signing tool supporting flexible deployment modes to keep keys offline, unavailable for unauthorized access. Note. Make sure the solution supports leading platforms and tech libraries, from Android and Java to Authenticode and OpenSSL.

Given that DevSecOps is nothing about testing security boundaries, zero trust automation is yet another cornerstone. It enables dynamic, well-thought permissions while protecting software development environments from any harm, either from outside or inside. Meaning, malicious access can be blocked right off.

Unlike a traditional perimeter-based cybersecurity model, zero trust architectures enforce the least privilege principle. Namely, they automatically layer networks to validate internal connections before trusting them. No security breaches, no fraudulent access to databases, IPs or credentials — pure blessing.

Today, surviving through the dark sides of having digital business isn’t an option, but an obligation. Since the Executive Order on Improving the Nation's Cybersecurity is officially out, we testify to governmental concern on the issue. And yep, face even more pressure.

Seems a good reason to embrace value stream management. What’s in it for you, in a nutshell? The thing is that by interconnecting DevSecOps environments, value stream management brings in unparalleled consistency and transparency. 

From task planning, test automation, CI/CD, security testing, audit and beyond — it streamlines all kinds of activities. You introduce a value stream management platform that integrates with existing tools, analyzes data, and qualifies pipeline opportunities — and behold improved guidance and progress control.

As DevSecOps tools evolve and set the coding security bar higher than ever, all it takes is to carefully pick the solutions that are organic to your development environment. Better select the instruments that support your issue tracking system in place — it’s convenient to get reports directly.

Basically, there are two major groups of DevSecOps-compatible platforms — the ones for either dynamic or static app security testing (DAST or SAST). The DAST tools are intended for detecting vulnerabilities by running apps right in their production environment, while the SASTs search for flaws within source code.

What’s critical is to make sure your tool of choice has fully-fledged APIs, enables highly-automated governance, allows efficient management of cloud-native artifacts, and ensures solid visibility into multi-layer environments.

Just on the spot, the well-known and test-driven DAST tools are GitLab, Bright, OWASP Zap, Detectify, StackHawk. Popular SASTs are SpectralOps, Klocwork, Veracode, Checkmarx, Codacy, LGTM. Also, there are plenty of threat modeling and audit solutions — choose what’s most instrumental in your DevSecOps environment.

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That’s a pretty nice job we’ve just done deconstructing DevOps, DevSecOps, and DevEverythingOps — high time to bring the knowledge into practice. Fingers crossed we had you at the Cybersecurity Order. 

Aching to have you for another round any time soon.