As October is observed as a cybersecurity awareness month, it’s worthwhile to look back at how far the Middle East has come in its journey toward cybersecurity. People are already conversing on how moderately organizations across the region have matured about recognizing threats to business disruption. According to PwC research, some 45% of regional organizations will have cyber risk mitigation among their top five priorities.
Just as true as this is, awareness by itself will not avail an organization of addressing some of the cyber-risks. Important as it is, action should follow it. It isn’t for all or any kind of stakeholders but probably no more important anywhere else than on DevOps, where humans are usually the weakest link in the security chain.
Introduction
One method DevOps teams are adopting to have speed and security alignment is practicing “shift left,” which means that practices related to testing software are moved as early as possible within the development process. DevOps teams in the Middle East could identify bugs, errors, and vulnerabilities early on by adopting shift left, resolve them, and produce highly performing and highly secure software and applications.
Here are the four important steps DevOps matters can take to adopt shift left, improve application performance, reduce vulnerabilities, and win the security.
Define Your Security Plan
To accomplish great ends, as evidenced by exemplary national visions of the UAE and Saudi Arabia, one needs to articulate a pretty good action plan. This will be true for any DevOps unit that has decided to shift left. Companies should take time to determine who will take on each responsibility, define metrics for success, and formalize procedures. DevOps leaders must build the appropriately staff teams and install processes that maximize security and determine what kinds of tests they will run and how often they will run them. Businesses should also find the specific known vulnerabilities and prepare for them in order to eliminate potential issues. Shift left means new doctrines in software delivery and security; therefore, planning and strategy definition is critical. At SolarWinds, we believe security should be intrinsic in all people, processes, and organizations, which is why we designed and introduced Secure by Design. This is a gold-plated standard in cybersecurity, focused on people, infrastructure, and software development.
Understand Deployment Process and the development Pipeline
When organizations embark on a shift-left journey, more specific areas or boundaries between understanding the software development pipeline and deployment need to be leveled.
Build and deliver software and applications have become the integrated tools and processes under this line. After such an analysis and understanding, DevOps teams should proceed to do testing in the build pipelines, check code validity within development environments, and other areas.
And one of such solutions supporting DevOps teams in pipeline mapping and understanding and shifting left is observability. With observability, teams could help teams get a single-pane-of-glass view cross applications, databases, and infrastructures, which can be key to understanding application performance and user experience, and those all-encompassing environments necessary for modern application architecture. There are observability solutions that even have live code profiling, which automatically sees potential user issues or performance bottlenecks before they are shipped.
Incorporate Security Automation
Software teams have turned to automation to cater to various factors concerning enterprise technology. Firstly, manual approaches to testing software would introduce human errors that corporations strive to avoid as much as possible. The next is that it requires organizations to test their software as soon and often as possible and as an extension of the shift left. These principles are aimed at more secure and better performing products. However, such high volumes of testing usually overcloud the work load on the teams and makes DevOps manually test every new feature pushed from the development team.
DevOps teams should use tools that automate running tests to avoid this scenario. Such measures would relieve stress to the DevOps teams and yet have faster feedback with respect to any vulnerability that would be found in software codes. Generally, automating tests in the development cycle enables organizations to increase speed toward completing a product while ensuring that fewer bugs or vulnerabilities will be found later.
Create a Culture of Transparency
Automation and modern technology can bring success to an organisation. However, there is a very human process and trait that plays an equally important role – communication and transparency.
The narrowing of the distance between development and production is the core of DevOps. All of these, increasing communication and transparency in the product and software development lifecycle stages, do shift towards the left. Involving the right people as early as possible and at every step helps in transparency.
Communication to add as much transparency as possible within the process helps people understand how to test, what weaknesses to look for, and how to make the software and applications more secure, better performing, and more resilient.
Shift Left, or Be Left Behind
In an area where stakes are higher than ever, cybersecurity-related threats unleash the most damage, and DevOps teams in Middle East regions are playing a critical role in securing their organizations from future damages. These teams have now begun adopting the change to prevent security breaches across very end-to-end stages of the software development process. From clear definitions to automated processes to transparent approach, everything they do today determines the creation of highly secured highly performing applications that will outlive potential upcoming cyber threats.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is meant by DevOps Delivery?
DevOps is simply the convergence of cultural philosophies, practice, and tools that enhances an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services at high speed: evolving and improving products much faster than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.
What is the difference between DevOps and delivery?
It is the way of performing an operation, not a job description or a particular group working in a silo among developing and producing. While this is a huge concept, it is much more precisely about building and progressing the respective systems to hasten the delivery of software and infrastructure.
Is DevOps suitable in comparison to agile?
Differences and Similarities. The DevOps model brings development and operation divisions together, while Agile improves efficiency and productivity for developers and software development life cycles. The two have made strides toward enabling new software development practices in the modern world.
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