18 Dec DevOps Security Checklist: What You Need to Know

Unfortunately, hackers have found out, know where to look, and are negligent. DevOps security refers to the discipline and practice of protecting the entire DevOps environment through strategies, policies, processes, and technologies. We should build security into every part of the DevOps lifecycle, including when it starts, designs, builds, testing, approves, supports, maintains, and beyond. 

DevOps security best practices are emphatically recommended by experts to guarantee the very best results during development projects of modern applications. 

Professionals need every valuable resource at hand to produce optimum outcomes, something that is particularly true in terms of security. There are too many threats out there, so we must play smart.

In the following lines, we will explore the recommended DevOps security checklist that every team must consider.

Monitoring

For DevOps, control is all about auditing and measuring on time. It must become a priority to schedule recurrent audits on the infrastructure, understanding your assets, determining their relevance, and keeping them updated. This process includes certificates, authorizations, and expiration dates.

Effective monitoring also includes keeping an eye on insider threats (which are the main threats, we dare to say), third-party vendors (they are often a liability), and real-time detection and notification of attacks.

Infrastructure

Laying out the foundations and keep every asset in order is essential for healthy DevOps security practices. Your product infrastructure must be stable and reliable, always backed up for increased safety.

In DevOps security, it’s a must to run frequent, properly-planned backups. Smartly manage access with cutting-edge authentication methods (we’ll mention 2FA later), keep everything up to date (especially after detecting a vulnerability), implement SSL certificates for enhanced encryption, and establish automated processes.

Culture

Breaking down the existent barriers between teams is all about awareness and training. Development, Security, and Operations must be on the same page, and on this checklist, we have a solid recommendation to achieve just that.

Professionals need to be on top of the best practices in the industry. That includes being always up to date regarding technologies and vulnerabilities. Part of this is being fully aware of the threat luring the organization and understanding that risk is unavoidable, an approach that will allow you to be more careful and choose your options more thoughtfully.

The next step is to have effective onboarding/offboarding and training protocols for the staff. Having people arriving or leaving the company is something that creates challenges that must be addressed. In the same line of thought, existent employees require trained continuously to perform at their best in terms of security.

Code

Adequate DevOps security relies on the highest standards in coding. Taking care of the coding aspect involves putting your system under stress with security tests to find vulnerabilities (think of Static Application Security Testing), keeping dependencies up to date, and ensuring security header.

One step further in terms of code includes integrating a Dynamic Application Security Testing tool in the CI, taking stress tests to the next level with ethical hacking, setting up proper security layers for the CI/CD tools that your team uses, and using standard encryption methods instead of your own.

Protection

Finally, this phase of DevOps security is all about the frontal, more visible protection methods for your assets and workflows. Here, professionals will go from the most straightforward practices in cybersecurity to the most advanced mechanisms.

Let’s begin with avoiding storing sensitive information that isn’t necessary (like credit cards), establishing security policies for all parties involved and share them with the teams, ensuring enhanced protection for the infrastructure, guaranteeing full compliance with industry standards, and providing the right resources for the individual account protection.

A mandatory step these days is to implement two-factor authentication whenever and wherever is possible. We all having abundant options in this aspect. For companies that want to go the extra mile, bug bounty programs can be precious to find and resolve vulnerabilities on time before malicious parties do.