Shifting security left in your DevSecOps process is supposed to make everyone’s lives easier. But too often, it just piles more work onto developers. They’re stuck juggling complex tools, chasing down vulnerabilities, and feeling like security is slowing them down. Sound familiar?
Good news: it doesn’t have to be this way. With the right strategy and tools, shifting left can actually BOOST developer productivity. Let’s break down the common challenges and explore solutions that empower your developers to build and deploy code faster AND more securely.
Challenges of Shifting Left in DevSecOps
The DevSecOps Workload Explosion:
- Tool Fatigue: Developers are drowning in a sea of SAST, DAST, SCA, container scanning… Managing these tools takes time away from coding.
- Manual Security Tasks: Triaging alerts, interpreting complex reports, and coordinating with security teams… It’s a constant context switch that kills focus.
- Skill Gap Anxiety: Security isn’t everyone’s forte. Expecting developers to become experts overnight is unrealistic and stressful.
Security Data Scattered Everywhere:
- The “Many Dashboards” Problem: AppSec teams have no single source of truth. Security data lives in silos, making it hard to get a holistic view of risk.
- Missing Connections: Even when data IS gathered, it’s often not linked to the right context (e.g., which code change triggered a vulnerability alert?).
- Delayed Insights: Without real-time monitoring, vulnerabilities can fester undetected, leading to costly fixes later in the cycle.
Policies That Get in the Way, Not Out of the Way:
- Manual Approvals: Waiting for someone to sign off on code releases is a bottleneck developers hate.
- Inconsistent Enforcement: Policies applied manually are prone to error and variation across environments.
- Security as an Afterthought: If policies are opaque or difficult to understand, devs will treat them as an annoyance to be circumvented.
Incident Response: Too Little, Too Late:
- “Surprise!” Vulnerabilities: New CVEs emerge constantly. Without continuous scanning, you’re blindsided and scrambling to react.
- Fixing the Wrong Things First: Lack of prioritization means devs waste time fixing low-impact issues while critical ones slip through.
- Patching Chaos: Coordinating fixes across teams and environments is a nightmare when you’re reacting to a crisis.
Essential Capabilities for Effective Shift Left DevSecOps
To address these challenges and truly empower developers, several key capabilities are needed:
Pre-Flight Checks
- Application Security Posture: Compare security posture across development, staging, and production environments to identify discrepancies.
- Security Delta Analysis: Generate a punch list of security gaps between environments, allowing for targeted remediation.
Prioritizing Security Fixes
- Punch List Isolation: Identify and prioritize security gaps that need immediate attention.
- Priority Setting Tools: Use tooling to set security priorities at both application and global levels, enabling developers to focus on critical issues.
- Exception and Deferment Handling: Implement an escape hatch for applying for exceptions and deferments to maintain development velocity.
Developer Policy Visibility
- Clear Policy Communication: Ensure policies are well-documented, including the severity of violations and actions (e.g., alert vs. block deployment).
- Read-Only Policy Access: Provide developers with read-only access to security policies to foster transparency and compliance.
- Change Management Process: Implement an agile change management process for updating security policies.
Actionable Security Guidance
- Guidance Provision: Offer clear, actionable guidance on how to address identified security gaps.
- Integrated Support: Embed this guidance within the development environment and workflow to minimize disruption.
Efficient Exception Management
- Approval Workflow: Establish a clear approval process for exceptions, including timeboxed exceptions and tracking.
- Exception Reporting: Maintain a system for tracking and reporting exceptions, linking them back to change management tools like Jira.
Summary
Shifting security left in DevSecOps presents several challenges, from increased workloads and tool fatigue to fragmented data and inconsistent policy enforcement. However, by implementing essential capabilities such as pre-flight checks, prioritizing security fixes, ensuring developer policy visibility, providing actionable guidance, and efficient exception management, organizations can overcome these obstacles and truly empower developers.
By addressing these challenges, you can enable your developers to build and deploy secure software faster, ensuring that security enhances productivity rather than hindering it.
To learn more about these strategies and best practices, download our comprehensive ebook, “Four Effective Strategies for Optimizing Application Security with ASPM.” This ebook provides valuable insights into managing alert overload, empowering developers, unifying siloed data, and leveraging open-source tools to enhance your AppSec environment.
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 Deploy Shield adds DevSecOps to your existing CI/CD tools with application security orchestration, correlation, and posture management.
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