As organizations embrace new technologies in support of their digital transformation goals, they must also bring web app security up to speed. The shift to DevOps and cloud initiatives, where technology that’s software-defined and more automated takes center stage, means that you can respond faster to market demands. But is that speed putting your environment at risk? Can you continue to realize faster application deployment and agility while still defending against cybersecurity threats?
Yes. If you employ the right technology along the way.
Enabling Agile Security
The rate of change is increasing by multiple orders of magnitude. In the classic waterfall datacenter world, change was very rare. Thus, security solutions were built on a more change-free environment where there was time to review everything before it went out the door.
Enter the age of DevOps where the rate of change is increasingly multiplied – by orders of magnitude. This has driven the need to more actively defend applications and APIs, regardless of the tech stack being used, in a much more agile and rapid way. Further, because today’s applications and workflows span clouds and hybrid infrastructure, they demand solutions that seamlessly work across the full environment – so that security is not the barrier to innovation.
In a world where operations and the business are getting closer to the developers and teams are engaged together in driving digital transformation – security needs to become agile.
To truly achieve the concept of DevSecOps, organizations need security solutions that will help them achieve the following three things:
- Scale. DevSecOps teams need security approaches that can dramatically scale in support of their new software-defined strategies. Legacy tools were only built for dedicated security teams, using the processes and language they relate to. And they weren’t optimized for the more dynamic nature of today’s hybrid infrastructure. Today’s new and changing environments require security approaches with the elasticity and understanding that will support the modern enterprise, no matter how diverse it may be.
- Collaboration. DevSecOps also requires modern security tooling that can be used collaboratively by development, security and operations teams alike, in the way they want to work. By bridging teams and driving collaboration, modern security tools can empower teams to support security throughout the development and operations processes, rather than addressing security as a separate silo that can potentially stall product delivery.
- Productivity. Development teams are tasked with product delivery, and anything that might stand in their way will likely be overcome – even if it means standing up shadow IT infrastructure to meet their delivery dates. To avoid the risk of shadow IT infrastructure, security tools must serve the needs of development and operations without slowing productivity down. Security tools need to work in the developer’s world, in a transparent and seamless way.
Security Can’t Get in the Way
To truly achieve DevSecOps, in its most productive form, security needs to shift away from being a gatekeeper to an enabler of the more rapid delivery of secure applications. To do this, security needs to have a “seat at the table” without impeding infrastructure operations or development commits on code.
With security tooling that goes where the developers live, secure applications can be built in the most frictionless way possible. With modern technologies that allow developers to be more security self-sufficient, by injecting security workflows into the development environment, the business can find a historically challenging balance and realize the rapid, secure application development they need to become more competitive. 
