DevSecOps and Risk Mitigation

Armory’s Continuous Deployment solutions eliminate the reliance on manual security processes by integrating with security test suites and automating security scans, promoting deployments to production only if all tests and scans pass. Safely share and version your configurations for faster, more reliable, and secure deployments when integrating with the top Vaults like HashiCorp, and automate the creation and enforcement of the policies that govern your software and infrastructure deployment. Deploy to production knowing you are secure and compliant.

What is DevSecOps and Risk Mitigation?

DevSecOps, which is short for development, security, and operations, is the practice of integrating security processes into every stage of your software development lifecycle (SDLC) to ensure secure applications are reaching your customers and users. The primary goal of security processes and DevSecOps is risk mitigation. Risk mitigation decreases potential threats by eliminating or intercepting hackers before there’s an attack or reduces the consequences if an attack does occur.

According to the 2022 GitLab Global DevOps Survey:

  • 36% of 2022 respondents develop software using DevSecOps, compared to only 27% in 2020.  
  • 96% said their organization would benefit from automated security and compliance
  • 60% of developers are releasing code twice as quickly due to DevOps improvements. However, almost 50% of organizations deploy vulnerable code because of time crunch

Problem: Manual policy checks and security processes do not scale

Modern DevSecOps practices empower users to make operational changes, causing historic manual practices using disparate mechanisms to break down and fail. This means that instead of creating value, teams are spending time making sure boxes are checked.

When policy checks are carried out manually, they are time consuming and not scalable, especially when there are numerous microservices and pipelines. This translates to diminished speed-to-market and increased risk and often results in security scanners being run on a schedule, rather than for every change. 

Policy change at an organization level is difficult to propagate in real-time because policy documentation is usually generated, shared and implemented in different systems and teams. This ultimately diminishes speed-to-market, but with critical policy updates it can also increase deployment risks. 

Non-adherence of policy or accidental mistakes like unauthorized person deploying a change or deploying an application can cause damage to the company’s top line, increase risk and disrupt a customer experience.

Armory’s Solution: Integrated security scanning and automated environment promotion (along with enforced policies)

Security is everyone’s responsibility and is of the utmost importance to companies everywhere. Access, authorization, customer data, as well as reliability, integrity, and the customer experience must remain secure and assured. Armory enables you to maintain compliance and control both in production and non-production environments and adopt modern DevOps and DevSecOps practices – shift left – to empower your developers to make operational changes and automate policies.

Automatically run Security scanners in a deployed environment – Armory eliminates the reliance on manual security processes by integrating with security test suites and automating security scans, promoting deployments to production only if all tests and scans pass. 

Embracing Pipelines-as-Code makes it easy for you to manage privileges at scale while automating compliance empowers you to standardized compliance at scale. Automate creating and enforcing policies that govern your software and infrastructure deployment, along with leveraging Secrets Management and integrations to top vaults – to increase your deployment security and so you can deploy to production knowing you are compliant. When it’s audit time, you can use your history and policies to tell your story.

Customer Success Story

LaunchDarkly pioneered the feature management category to enable companies like Square, IBM, and NBC to deploy code faster with less risk. Initially, LaunchDarkly relied on a homegrown manual continuous delivery (CD) process. As the development team grew, however, their homegrown system began to break down. Concerned about the impact on engineers and customers, LaunchDarkly turned to AWS Partner Armory and Armory Continuous Deployment, with open-source CD platform Spinnaker at its core. Since moving to Armory, LaunchDarkly has increased its deployment frequency by 1475% and its DevOps capacity by 250%, leading to safer and more reliable deployments.

Learn more about LaunchDarkly’s success story with Armory

How It Works

  • Deploy to a dedicated security testing environment to perform your test(s), while leveraging webhooks to trigger security scanners, and only deploy to production environments if the security test(s) and scanners pass successfully
  • Create policies to be enforced at certain stages of your deployment, like requiring approvals by one or multiple roles before deploying to specific environments
  • Utilize Role Based Access Control (RBAC) within policies to restrict actions, designate access and usage, or hide specific UI elements based on role
  • Keep configuration files in source control while protecting secrets within a secret store, like Vault. Instead of committing your secrets in plain text to source control, Secrets Management allows you to commit only the location of a secret in a secret store to your configuration files
  • Set permissions for different roles, ensuring individuals have proper access through role based access control

Benefits

Automating security scanning ensures every change is scanned, every time, so that no change introduces a known security vulnerability. When you standardize and automate your policy implementations and compliance, you simplify operations, accelerate your time-to-market, and decrease deployment risks. Simply put, enforcing security processes keeps you compliant and allows you to achieve the goal of risk mitigation.

Who it Benefits

  • Platform Ops – Don’t spend time troubleshooting mistakes that might have been made by others with too much access. Simplify your operations and services so developers can’t affect one another’s deployments or configurations.
  • Application Devs – Don’t worry about causing an issue with someone else’s deployment, or their configuration. Policies and RBAC make sure you create and use only what you’re allowed to.
  • InfoSec – By automating security scanning you ensure every change is scanned, every time, so that no change introduces a known security vulnerability.
  • Executives – By automating policy compliance and enforcing security processes, you simplify operations, accelerate your time-to-market, and decrease deployment risks; all while remaining compliant.

Summary

  • DevSecOps integrates security processes into every stage of your SDLC to keep you compliant while remaining agile, and able to practice risk mitigation techniques.
  • Manual risk mitigation practices using disparate mechanisms break down and fail
  • When policy checks are carried out manually, they are time consuming and not scalable
  • Armory enables you to maintain compliance and control both in production and non-production environments and adopt modern DevOps and DevSecOps practices – shift left – to empower your developers to make operational changes, automate policies, and mitigate risk

FAQ

What is DevSecOps vs DevOps?

What is DevSecOps in Cyber Security?

Is DevSecOps a Framework?

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