Undoubtedly DevOps provides an intelligent, efficient and faster methodology to develop and deploy application but security is still a concern.DevOps might appear more secure on paper but with complex and highly distributed infrastructures becoming common in the platform to come new challenges that need to be addressed.
Without further ado, let’s get started.
Vulnerabilities You Can’t Ignore
Reckless use of recycled code
DevOps enhances developer productivity considerably by allowing them to reuse code from previous projects or open source repositories like GitHub. While focusing on productivity, proper screening and sanitization are essential else these codes can pose threats to an application.
Containers make your applications more vulnerable
Bringing the benefits of standardization and isolation, containers are spread across different systems. And the microservice approach involving a distributed infrastructure exposes your system to the network making the threat landscape larger and providing additional attack vectors. As containers are highly replicable, it becomes really easy for cyber attackers to sneak into your system.
Not so safe Hosts
Are you done by securing the containers? Think again! What about the hosts they are not automatically safe as they are vulnerable to day-zero attacks and ever-evolving new threats. It is essential to provide proper protection to hosts and also ensure container runtime is up-to-date to avoid risks.
Manage your sensitive data well
When leveraging DevOps, it is essential to create privileged accounts and login details. A host of useful data including:
- Confidential data
- Keys
- Database passwords
- Storage account credentials,
- Embedded passwords
must be stored in repositories and kept extremely secure as this information can be used by attackers for malicious activities.
Rethink using Multiple platforms
Running multiple workloads on one single platform is not a good idea. Your sensitive data/workloads should be distributed across a dedicated set of machines to avoid cyber attack from neighborhood applications. Further, it is highly important that sensitive metadata should be secured properly.
Don’t forget about the dynamic nature of cloud-native applications
Continuously integrated and deployed, cloud-native applications make it really difficult for the security teams to identify and eliminate risks. However, using traditional security tools can be disruptive for the organization as they can in no way match the incredible dynamics and sheer velocity and scale of cloud-native applications.
Safety Solutions
There is no point in just getting our readers informed about the vulnerabilities.What about the solutions to overcome these security challenges. Come, let’s get started.
DevSecOps: The future ahead
Unlike the conventional approach, security is not an afterthought in the DevOps way. In fact, security is among the top most priorities. This can be achieved by using DevSecOps-the new security norm. In this approach the security and operations teams work together to ensure that an application is secure from the ground root level and not just on the surface. It is also important to involve security experts right from the initial stages of development. This will help them gain crucial insights into how the app functions and what it is all about so they can identify risks better mitigate them.
Symantec Cloud Workload Protection (CWP)
CWP is essential for modern software development as it enables organizations to monitor and protect their workloads irrespective of where they reside. The harbinger of good times ensures
organizations don’t have to look for multiple products.All they need is CWP to meet their many security needs.
Understanding CWP
With CWP superpower you can monitor and manage security across various platforms using a single console. It offers visibility into various security postures and software. Automatic discovery of workloads across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud is now possible using CWP. Adding to the charm of CWP is the continuous delivery workflows and malware prevention feature.
