3 focus areas for DevSecOps success

When it comes to adopting DevSecOps, organizations sometimes focus on overarching goals like improving business agility or digital transformation. Such a broad scope can make DevSecOps adoption difficult. Instead, companies might find more success by breaking down their focus into three areas: increasing team collaboration, incorporating a new mindset with tools, and measuring progress.

Impact of the team

Beyond simply adopting a specific toolchain or a toolset, collaboration between teams is critical to enabling DevSecOps concepts and strategies. DevSecOps is meant to bring teams together as a united front, break down silos and to remove inefficiencies that can slow or halt innovation.

Utilizing open processes and working collaboratively has had a significant impact on many of our customers and their ability to drive business goals. Bridging traditional gaps between IT and security, DevSecOps enables teams to streamline work and share the goal and responsibility of security throughout the phases of software delivery. 

For example, Omnitracs partnered with Red Hat to assist in their change to cloud-native development. Choosing to shift to modern tools and practices - including lean agile development, and integrating DevSecOps created a safe environment for change.

Incorporating a new security-focused mindset with tools

As part of this collaborative approach, the adoption of a new mindset around tools is necessary to ensure DevSecOps is embedded into the practical motions of the organization. Ask some key questions about your environment:

"Are you running code?"

"Are you running applications?"

"Are you running services that you expect, or that you think you’re running?"

Perhaps most importantly:

"Are they secure?"

The focus on security for both mindset and tools can help prevent potential impacts further down the line. Weak protocols, social engineering, and unprotected endpoints can bring unprecedented impacts—from costly repairs and extensive downtime, to negative reputation, and in some cases, shutting down a business for good.

We are aiming to be ubiquitous in our approach to security through DevSecOps. It’s not something specific tied to one customer or government entity. We want to be able to provide the tooling that says, "you are running what you thought you were running, and that you can ensure that those things are meeting your criteria." 

By analyzing this on the bits and bytes level, we can readily catch things through the DevSecOps process when it’s going from start to finish. Things in production are inextricably linked through the process, and when the analysis can be automated as much as possible, we can help make sure you’re hitting your preferred "risk profile." By mitigating these risks as much as possible, you can be confident in the security of your continued operations.

It doesn’t matter if there’s a current trending theme in the market around security; it’s always important. We’re always trying to make sure that we continue to evolve and provide the right toolsets to do that.

Measuring the progress

The final critical piece of adopting DevSecOps is that of measuring progress. If your organization is trying to increase the frequency of deployments and ensure the predictability of efficiency of applications and product life cycles, you should start looking at the deployment process itself and how security audits are performed. 

But there are pitfalls to be aware of. If the security profile isn’t fully considered, or the automation of said audits is lacking, your organization won’t be able to bear the fruits of these strategic plans.

It’s important to make the distinction between what outcome you’re trying to measure versus vanity metrics; evaluating change and pivoting KPIs is necessary to meeting expectations throughout the adoption of DevSecOps. Too often, unchanged KPIs can grant a false sense of success, and can hamper continued growth. The evolution of outcomes is necessary to ensure a stronger digital transformation. 

Conclusion

These three areas are a part of our strategy of how Red Hat Services can help you rapidly operationalize DevSecOps in your organization by establishing measurable, repeatable processes that focus on integrating security and compliance, incorporating new workflows and adopting a new mindset and culture around open source tooling. 

Our engagement model is grounded by experience. Our mentor-based approach follows an open collaboration process, helping your teams to adopt, develop and deliver on DevSecOps through trusted workflows from development to production. Ready to start your DevSecOps adoption? Reach out to a Red Hat Consultant to get started.