Speed of deployment: Security, compliance crucial to DevOps success

Increasing consumer demand and changing business trends have intensified the market competition than ever.

To maintain a competitive edge in this tough scenario means innovating faster, making quick releases and being up to date with less turnaround times.

Especially if you have a customer-facing app, then the scenario will be much more serious. You need to ensure the app offers cutting-edge solutions and is updated with relevant tools and resources, and highly responsive.

You can’t afford to let your application or service go down even for a period, even during updates, as that hits your customer loyalty.

This is where the speed of deployment matters, which is today one of the core DevOps metrics.

On the other hand, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) have already become de facto standards across organizations in their DevOps journey.

Meanwhile, incremental software development and continuous deployment using Kubernetes, containers, and microservices have already made their way deeper into enterprises as successful methods.

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Security, compliance continue to contend

While continuous deployment stands crucial to continuous delivery, security and compliance issues continue to contend continuous delivery mechanism.

DevOps has shown a path to faster innovation. But on the flip side of it lies the possibility of increased infrastructure vulnerability.

Traditional security testing fails to match with the agile DevOps tools. They are usually slow, cumbersome and require security professionals, unlike the DevOps mindset that involves agile principles and automation procedures.

On the other hand, compliance issues continue to challenge organizations obstructing DevOps flow, for instance, some apps demand re-certification for every fresh update.

Thus, security and compliance continue to contend the speed of deployment.

In such a case of a compliance examination or external security threat, halting CI/CD cycles definitely hampers business’ productivity.

Moreover, DevOps teams lack expertise in understanding and addressing security challenges.

Here is where DevSecOps proves an advantage!

DevSecOps for continuous deployment

Security at the end of the development (as in traditional security model) not only compromises the app’s security but also impacts the speed of deployment.

The solution to this is implementing security earlier in the process chain. This shift-left approach is the ‘DevSecOps’ approach.

DevSecOps ensures security integration across all stages of the process chain without hampering the speed of deployment.

The DevSecOps model adapts security tools, policies, and processes into the DevOps toolchain, and facilitates continuous cycles by ensuring the tools and resources are automatically applied on every iteration.

This translates to continuous security, where source code and open-source libraries are continuously scanned for vulnerabilities in the development cycle.

Thus, DevSecOps brings security under the ambit of continuous delivery cycles, thus accelerating the speed of deployment.

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In conclusion

The speed of deployment is the crucial aspect of DevOps success, and security and compliance factors stand key in achieving the goal of faster deployment.

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