As security threats in recent years have become faster to surface and more complex to deal with due to the COVID-19 pandemic effects, more advanced tools, and creative cybercriminals, organizations are accelerating their shift away from outdated, reactive software engineering security processes.

Public sector agencies, for example, are more frequently introducing a DevSecOps approach, which introduces continual security engineering and testing throughout Agile-oriented software development lifecycles, ensuring application security is maintained in even the most rapidly-changing IT environments.

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps is a cultural paradigm that keeps cross-functional teams working side-by-side with deep expertise and commitment to automation. The hard-working teams that implement DevSecOps maintain a critical focus on cyber protection, even for the smallest, quickest change requests. This paradigm consists of agile software delivery and automated processes that enable constant integration of secure application release cycles between software development and IT operations teams, so that they can build, test, and release software faster and more reliably.  Shifting to DevSecOps also helps to improve and more quickly address vulnerabilities in an organization’s overall cybersecurity posture, promoting useful, productive collaboration across all IT teams as a shared mission responsibility.

Leveraging processes such as Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), developers find and fix bugs very early in the development cycle, driving speed and efficiency. The DevSecOps paradigm includes this method to bake cybersecurity right into new software and applications, consistent with all IT operations and infrastructure security controls (often not well known by the development teams).

How Does DevSecOps Fit Into Your Digital Transformation?

As transforming agencies have begun to quickly grow and adapt IT development, security, and operations practices to foster innovation, how are these organizations ensuring that data security and privacy concerns are not lost in the shuffle?

Early adopters of Agile methods for fast, frequent software change used a DevOps framework, which delivered needed scale and functionality. However, this approach often lacked attention to overall and real-time corporate and industry cybersecurity compliance. This is where the need for DevSecOps developed.

With security baked into the coding and data engineering processes, attention to security is maintained for developers and test teams, including users, as they rapidly create and deploy applications and updated features. Added security features include code check-ins and automated integration, scanning, and testing. This can help expose any weaknesses and remediate actions well before applications are released for mission users, and potentially exposed to cyber threats or bad actors.

The DevSecOps Approach for Your Agency

When it comes to implementing efficient, reliable, and cost-effective strategies for application security, REI Systems relies upon and offers its customers a highly effective DevSecOps approach to software engineering. Our DevSecOps ecosystem, backed by highly skilled professionals, is a collection of tools and process workflows created to automate many tasks in the software development lifecycle while tailored to our customer’s environments.

The DevSecOps team at REI consists of functional and technical experts, combining skills in Agile process management, information security, business analysis, UX design, full-stack engineering, DevSecOps automation, and automated testing.  Our teams apply a cloud-native model’s administrative, technical, and operational techniques.

REI’s DevSecOps approach:

• Encourages consecutive collaboration to increase engineering lifecycle exposure to the product by various teams, therefore improving ideation
• Integrates active security checks at the start of the software and application lifecycle and remediation complying with Federal security policies, including Zero Trust security framework
• Automates everywhere to ensure identical execution of highly repeatable processes ensuring consistently high-quality software releases
• Increases the volume and frequency of production releases – without delays – while reducing or eliminating errors
• Leverages secure configuration-driven immutable infrastructure to provide parity of environments supporting quality across lifecycle environments
• Ensures real-time operational awareness of the entire software landscape monitoring, from user experience to backplane diagnostics
• Enables ownership and responsibility of product quality and data protection

Ready to hear more about how implementing a DevSecOps strategy can help your agency? Call REI Systems Inc. at (703) 480-9100 or visit the REI website.