Red Hat SummitStart your DevSecOps initiatives with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Security is a leading issue for most organizations. In fact, 47% of CEOs are extremely concerned about cyber threats.1 This apprehension is not unfounded: the number and severity, and cost of security breaches continue to grow. As a result, 47% of organizations cite security and privacy as a top technology investment area.2
Even so, traditional security approaches often conflict with agile application development methodologies and DevOps practices. While DevSecOps approaches can bring development, security, and operations teams together, it can be difficult to get started and successfully implement these initiatives.
IT automation can help. The foundation of successful DevSecOps initiatives is an effective, enterprise-wide automation strategy. This checklist reviews 5 ways you can use Red Hat® Ansible® Automation Platform to start your DevSecOps initiatives.
1 Standardize your workflows and processes
Disparate tools, practices, and processes can impede collaboration, visibility, and productivity in cross-functional initiatives like DevSecOps. Standardize your workflows to allow your teams to collaborate more easily and share information, ideas, and best practices. Automating your life-cycle operations provides an ideal opportunity to create consistent, repeatable processes that simplify interactions between development, IT infrastructure, and security teams.
Using a single, human-readable language, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform delivers a unified, user-friendly automation foundation that promotes collaboration, transparency, and consistency across all aspects of your IT environment, including applications, security, networks, and infrastructure.
2 Bring teams together with a common objective
When teams working on the same project have contrasting goals, they cannot collaborate effectively and the end result of the project suffers. Bring your development, security, and operations teams together with a common objective. Sharing responsibility for the overall outcome of the project across teams promotes collaboration and realigns efforts. This shared focus also allows you to create workflows that define how teams interact with each other, reducing friction and streamlining processes.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provides a consolidated foundation on which all of your teams can collaborate and automate consistently. It also offers ways to efficiently manage and share automation between teams while maintaining security with role-based access controls (RBAC). Using a human-readable automation language, all team members can participate in the same workflows, leading to better team alignment and faster results.
3 Automate security throughout your application life cycle
Whether your organization builds applications in-house or purchases third-party applications to integrate and customize, automation can help you add security throughout your application life cycle. Create common, automated pipelines that bring security tools and checks into your application development and deployment processes. This approach allows all team members to perform approved security checks at each stage, ensuring security and consistency are built into your applications from the start.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform delivers the tools and features you need to automate your application life cycle. Integration with third-party security tools allows you to codify your current processes into an automated workflow.
4 Start small and iterate
Adopting automation at scale is an iterative process. Start with a single project, show value, expand conservatively, and repeat. Pursue incremental automation successes over short periods of time while measuring your results and adapting accordingly. Promote each win and share your experience across your organization. Repeat this process until you’ve reached the right level of automation for your organization.
To help you get started more quickly and easily, Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform includes access to Automation Hub, a centralized repository for certified automation content. Automation Hub provides a place for you to store your own automation assets and access Content Collections. Created by Red Hat and Red Hat Certified Partners, Content Collections deliver tested, verified, supported automation code for many third-party platforms and tools.
5 Scale with cloud technologies
Cloud technologies — including containers, Kubernetes, and public cloud services — can help you implement DevSecOps at scale. Deploy these technologies alongside cloud-ready, container-specific security and management tools, certified container images, and trusted third-party security products to protect your DevSecOps environment and organization. Adopt an application programming interface (API) first approach to ensure interoperability. Use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies to inform security decisions and adapt your infrastructure security and application development processes.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform can automate multicluster Kubernetes environment deployment, container builds, cluster management, application life cycles, and more. It also helps you operate consistently across private, public, and hybrid cloud environments.
