Role of Security in the ?Shift Left? Application Security

Posted by karen minton on June 29th, 2018

As the dependency of the users on the software’s continues to grow then, the organizations are increasingly taking a DevOps and agile approach to the software application development programs. Consequently, the operation and the development teams have assimilated, and now the developers play a vigorous role in managing the post-production of the software.

However, to meet the demands for a quicker time to the market, then the development teams are “Shifting Left” security which is moving it further down to the software development lifecycle with the developers that are increasingly being tasked with the building secure software from the outset.

As a result, the DevSecOps process will require developers to take greater responsibility only for securing the software’s as well as for building it, and therefore the consideration must be given as to what this means for the members of the security team.

Always Try to Think like Builders

The most significant advantages of this approach are that through the employing Scrum teams, multi-disciplinary teams with the accountability for one application, one piece of an application, or one micro-service, the needs for a handoff between the teams can be avoided. These Scrum teams are responsible for the planning, coding, performance, testing, uptime and now with the introduction of the DevSecOps, they’re also going to be responsible for the security purposes.

For succeeding in this environment, the very first thing the security team will have to do is to start thinking more like the builders than the breakers. With the progress of software development concluding in the fully automated pipelines which are used in DevOps,

Now, the security experts must consider that they can easily create a process that will deliver to the correct outcome from the get-go, rather than the discovering vulnerabilities and risk which can further down the line.

Always Test Early and Test Often

The security professionals should need to work with the development teams to recognizing the earliest point that manual processes, such as threat modeling, and manual testing which can be effectively implemented to avoid the lengthy remediation before the deadline of delivery.

The Manual testing should be done early in some small batches only on features that require it, rather than the multiple Scrum teams which are having to test a lot of functionality a few days before when the software is due to be released. And also the threat modeling can be only done when there is a design in place; the code even doesn’t necessarily need to have been written fully.

Create a Team of Security Champions

Though the security teams cannot be everywhere at the same time, the majority of companies having a large ratio of developers to the AppSec experts or might be greater than others. It is a very necessary aspect of the DevSecOps model so that many of the organizations haven’t provided their developers with the adequate security training.

However, in the longer term, every Scrum team should include some knowledgeable security person that might be team’s security champion who should meet with the organization’s security experts on a very regular basis.

The presence of some security champion will avoid the situations in which the development team is unaware of the security implications of a particular piece of coding.

And the security champion should also identify that when a critical piece of code has been written badly or maybe something hasn’t been correctly fixed, but it requires some expertise that to bring in from the outside development team. After the identifying these issues, the security champion can easily escalate the situation and also call the security team at the accurate time.

Long Live the Security Team

One move towards the DevSecOps doesn’t mean that the role of the security team is deceased. Subsequently, now they need to lead on creating a culture and also processes that enable the shared accountability. That is working with their colleagues in the development team, as they need to work out with the shared goals, metrics, reporting and measurement that both the teams are going to hold themselves.

By doing this, they will allow their organization to securely deliver the applications at a speed that the app economy essentially requires.

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