Select Page

Viresh Garg

|
originally published on Nov 4, 2024
Share

Executive Summary

Shift-left security has become essential as organizations seek to address vulnerabilities early in the software development lifecycle, ensuring more robust security, enhanced compliance, and operational efficiency. However, traditional Shift-left practices, which focus on identifying vulnerabilities in code, dependencies, and testing, often leave gaps. While these tools can help identify issues, they rarely provide visibility into how fixing these issues reduces risk, ensures compliance, or improves operational efficiency in production. 

OpsMx takes a unique policy-based approach to Shift Left, enabling organizations to bridge these gaps effectively. With a library of 600+ policies, customizable tagging, real-time risk scoring, and actionable insights, OpsMx identifies vulnerabilities and provides a clear path for managing them to achieve meaningful security, compliance, and efficiency outcomes.

Understanding the Goals of Shift Left in Application Security

Shift Left security emphasizes embedding security practices early in the software development lifecycle—from design through deployment. This approach aims to address vulnerabilities before they reach production, enhancing security, compliance, and operational efficiency. The core objectives of Shift Left include:

1. Minimizing Security Risks in Production

  • Shift Left aims to design security into architecture, code, and dependencies, reducing post-deployment vulnerabilities that could threaten data Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA). This proactive approach minimizes the need for costly, post-deployment security tools and mitigations.

2. Maximizing Compliance and Enabling New Opportunities

  • Ensuring compliance from the start reduces the risk of regulatory penalties and opens new business opportunities, such as FedRAMP authorization for federal contracts. Shift Left security fosters a stronger, more adaptable compliance posture by embedding compliance controls into development.

3. Boosting Operational Efficiency in Production

  • When security is integrated at each stage of development, the likelihood of incidents post-deployment decreases. Fewer incidents mean reduced demands on SecOps, decreasing the workload on security analysts and incident response teams. This operational efficiency saves time and resources while protecting the organization’s reputation and bottom line.

The Limitations of Traditional ASPM Shift Left Approaches

Most Shift Left solutions today focus on identifying issues early in the lifecycle, particularly in code, dependencies, dynamic testing, and penetration testing. Application Security Posture Management (ASPM) solutions, while helpful, primarily provide risk-based prioritization without ensuring that security efforts in development truly fulfill Shift Left goals. This limited approach often results in:

1. Additional Work for Developers without Risk Reduction Guarantees

  • Traditional tools detect vulnerabilities but lack visibility into how remediation impacts risk in production. This creates additional tasks for developers without clarity on how these efforts achieve actual risk reduction in production.

2. Partial Compliance Tracking Without Measurable Impact

  • Traditional tools don’t fully align security activities with regulatory requirements, leaving developers to fix issues without understanding how each effort contributes to the organization’s compliance posture. This disconnect limits an organization’s ability to claim compliance or confidently access regulated markets.

3. Overwhelming Incident Response Teams with Unresolved Issues

  • Identifying vulnerabilities early is only part of the solution. Without a system to enforce and validate security, the burden often shifts to SecOps, which must handle incidents that could have been prevented with stronger proactive security controls.

To address these gaps, organizations need a policy-based approach that goes beyond vulnerability detection, enforcing security policies across development and deployment with a clear link to risk, compliance, and efficiency outcomes.

OpsMx: A Policy-Based Approach to Shift Left Security

OpsMx revolutionizes Shift Left security by offering a policy-driven approach that directly ties security efforts in development to risk, compliance, and operational efficiency goals in production. At the core of this approach is a library of over 600 customizable policies designed to support compliance, risk reduction, and operational goals across the software lifecycle.

OpsMx: A Policy-Based Approach to Shift Left Security

Key Features of the OpsMx Policy Library:

1. Extensive Compliance and Risk Framework Support

  • OpsMx’s policy library includes pre-tagged policies for standards such as FedRAMP, PCI-DSS, HIPAA, and GDPR, as well as alignment with risk frameworks like ISO and NIST. By incorporating these policies, organizations can integrate compliance into the development phase, reducing the need for post-deployment remediation.

2. Customizable Tagging for Specific Security and Operational Goals

  • With OpsMx, teams can tag policies according to specific objectives like “Operational Efficiency” or “Supply Chain Tool Posture.” For instance, some customers have tagged policies as “Ransomware Reduction” to ensure TLS and encryption checks are applied across the entire software lifecycle. This goal-oriented tagging empowers organizations to prioritize security measures aligned with their specific business needs.

3. Diverse Tagging Mechanisms for Tailored Security Posture

  • OpsMx supports tagging by Security Tool Posture, Risk Framework, Regulatory Mandate, Operational Goal, Incident Type, and Development Phase Goals (e.g., Code Security, Secret Scans, License Scan). These tags allow teams to focus on critical security checks in each development phase, ensuring a comprehensive and adaptable security approach.

This flexibility allows OpsMx customers to align their security policies with business, regulatory, and operational objectives, enabling a comprehensive and customizable proactive Shift Left strategy.

Risk Scoring and Actionable Insights: How OpsMx Brings Shift Left Goals to Life

OpsMx provides risk scoring and visibility into policy violations across all stages of development and deployment, transforming Shift Left security into a measurable strategy for risk reduction, compliance, and operational efficiency.

Tag-Specific Risk Scoring and Visibility

OpsMx calculates risk scores based on policy violations, offering insights into risk and compliance at various levels:

  • Code or Third-Party Vulnerabilities: See specific risk levels associated with code dependencies.
  • Risk Framework Compliance: Track alignment with frameworks like NIST and ISO.
  • Regulatory Compliance: Track FedRAMP, PCI-DSS, or HIPAA compliance in real-time.
Tag Specific Risk Scoring

Risk scores are available on-demand throughout the software lifecycle, allowing teams to monitor risk and compliance before, during, and after deployment. Historical trends provide visibility into improvements over time, helping teams understand how their efforts reduce risk, enhance compliance, and boost efficiency. This approach allows organizations to pinpoint high-performing areas and identify where additional training or process improvements are needed.

risk scores

Making Policy Violations Actionable

OpsMx enables real-time enforcement of security standards through policy-driven deployment controls:

  • Deployment Firewalls: Policies can instruct the firewall to block releases based on risk scores or policy violations. For example, a release with unresolved FedRAMP violations can be automatically halted until proper exception approval is obtained.
  • Exception Handling for High-Risk Violations: OpsMx offers flexibility for exception approvals, enabling organizations to decide which violations require approval and which should automatically block deployment. This functionality allows teams to focus on critical security controls, ensuring compliance without sacrificing agility.

Quantified Risk Scoring and Categories

OpsMx provides a risk score between 1 and 100, with categories from Apocalypse to Low. This score can be applied at the overall application level or by specific tags, such as compliance or incident type. This quantitative approach allows teams to monitor risk from multiple perspectives, whether it’s the overall risk score for a release or risk related to a specific compliance framework or incident type.

Developer and Administrator Productivity

The other critical aspect of achieving the shift-left goal to deliver the most optimized ROI on the DevSecOps efforts is to adopt a strategy and architecture and choose your shift-left tools that exclusively focus on getting buying-in from non-security stakeholders like developers, DevOps engineers, and tools and platform administrators. Check out our blog on how OpsMx has purpose-built features baked in its core architecture to facilitate these goals here.

Conclusion

Traditional Shift Left practices often fail to achieve the ultimate goals of risk reduction, compliance, and operational efficiency, as they focus primarily on identifying vulnerabilities rather than enforcing security and measuring its impact. OpsMx’s policy-based application security approach uniquely addresses this gap by providing 600+ pre-built policies, customizable tagging, real-time risk scoring, and actionable insights that link development activities to meaningful security outcomes.

By embedding policies across the development lifecycle and providing quantifiable risk metrics, OpsMx enables organizations to realize the full potential of Shift Left, building a secure, compliant, and efficient software delivery process. With OpsMx, Shift Left security transforms from a theoretical ideal into a practical, measurable strategy, empowering organizations to proactively manage risk, achieve compliance, and streamline operations in a way that traditional tools simply can’t.

About OpsMx

OpsMx is a leading innovator and thought leader in the Secure Continuous Delivery space. Leading technology companies such as Google, Cisco, Western Union, among others rely on OpsMx to ship better software faster.

OpsMx Secure CD is the industry’s first CI/CD solution designed for software supply chain security. With built-in compliance controls, automated security assessment, and policy enforcement, OpsMx Secure CD can help you deliver software quickly without sacrificing security.

OpsMx Delivery Shield adds DevSecOps capabilities to enterprise deployments by providing Application Security Posture Management (ASPM), unified visibility, compliance automation, and security policy enforcement to your existing application lifecycle.

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.