Friday, May 18, 2018

Software Defined Security for Secure DevOps



Core idea of DevOps is to build & deploy more applications and do that a whole lot faster. However, there are several security related challenges that needs to be addressed before a new application is deployed.

Software Defined Security addresses this challenge of making applications more secure - while keeping pace with business requirements for a DevOps deployment.

The fundamental concept of software defined security is the codify all security parameters/requirements into modules - which can be snapped on to any application. For example, micro segmentation, data security, encryption policies, activity monitoring, DMZ security posture etc are all coded into distinct modules and offered over a service catalog.

A small team of security experts can develop this code, review & validate it and make these security modules generally available for all application developers.

Application developers can select the required security modules at the time of deployment. This gives tremendous time to deployment advantage as it automates several security checks and audits that are done before deployment.

Security code review & security testing is done once at the security module level and thus individual security code review of each application can then be automated. This saves tremendous amount of time during application testing time - leading to faster deployment.

Software security is ever changing, so when a new standard or a security posture has to be modified, only the security modules are changed and applications can pick up the new security modules - thus automating security updates on a whole lot of individual applications. This leads to tremendous effort saving in operations management of deployed apps.


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