As a company building a SaaS security product, our inherent culture is not only focused on building best of breed security products for our users, but also ensuring that our systems, practices and workflows are engineered to support a continuously evolving threat landscape, and to protect our users’ data. We’ve written about our design for tenant isolation for our serverless based architecture in the past, and practical methods to avoid data leakage between clients.

DevSecOps is a collaborative practice that incorporates security into the development and delivery of software. DevSecOps encourages a culture where security, development, and operations teams collaborate closely; this collaboration ensures that security considerations are understood and implemented by everyone involved in the software development lifecycle.

In this new series, CJ May shares his expertise in implementing secure-by-design software processes that empower engineering teams. The first stage of his DevSecOps program: vulnerability management.

With the growing number of security frameworks, acronyms, scoring systems, benchmarks and more, it’s often hard to understand how each frameworks differs, how and where they come into play with regards to modern cloud native systems. More than anything, how do we actually operationalize these frameworks to derive engineering benefits?

When a new vulnerability is found, the race is on to either solve it or exploit it (depending on which side you’re on). But while attackers are getting faster, companies not so much. Dev teams take around 215 days to resolve a security vulnerability. The numbers are only marginally shorter when dealing with critical vulnerabilities. This delay is particularly concerning given the rise in zero-day exploits, where hackers take advantage of a security flaw before the organization even knows it exists.

DevSecOps pipelines arose in response to DevOps and CI/CD, which made it possible for developers to iteratively and continuously deliver small code changes, rather than massive deployments periodically. In theory, by integrating security into DevOps processes that enable continuous integration and delivery, developers could find and resolve security issues early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), which is much faster than fixing security issues in production.

How many security tools do you use daily? If you’re like 35% of developers, it’s probably too many for your liking. Building a DevSecOps toolchain is key to making DevSecOps a success and reaping all of its benefits. However, knowing where to start with so many different tools and processes can be overwhelming. This article will explain the key DevSecOps tools and processes, while providing a guidance for building a software security program that works for you.