Infrastructure as code (IaC) provides an innovative approach to provisioning and managing cloud infrastructure through code, instead of doing it through manual processes. This foundational shift not only accelerates development cycles but also introduces new dimensions of risk that must be carefully managed. In this article, we'll delve into these challenges and explore strategies to secure IaC environments from potential vulnerabilities and threats. 

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.

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.

As attack vectors expand due to architectural changes, such as distributed cloud deployment, APIs, and multiple access mechanisms, modern apps are under increasing threat. Additionally, with an ever-growing feature set, rapid release cycles, and dependency on third-party libraries, security is impacted at every application stage of the SDLC. Application-layer attacks have spiked by as much as 80% in 2023.

There's no doubt that no organization wants to be the victim of a cyber attack, but even the most security-minded entity can find itself caught off-guard or exposed when a zero-day exploit is discovered.

Earlier this year Jit announced Software Bill of Materials, which catalogs every open source component in your codebase – making it easy to understand if you are using an open source component that is impacted by a newly disclosed security vulnerability. With our new release of Open Source License Detection, you’ll also be able to detect the associated license of each open source component in your codebase.

In the realm of software development, DevSecOps has emerged as a transformative approach, merging the agility of DevOps with valuable security measures. As a methodology, DevSecOps is about proactively embedding security into the very fabric of the development process, ensuring that every code commit, feature addition, and software release is scanned and thoroughly reviewed for vulnerabilities.

By implementing security metrics that are as demonstrable as uptime and performance SLAs, DevSecOps leaders can showcase their engineering prowess in security.Measuring security in terms of MTTR, MTTD, Detection rate, Exposure window, as well as velocity, coverage, and uptime, can drive its evolution and development, providing similar automation, observability, and capabilities available in engineering.We encourage you to read this informative article, written by Daniel Koch, our very own VP of engineerin

In this blog post, we discuss how you can manage your security tools in your SDLC.It was great to partner with Daniel Begimher from AWS on this post in The New Stack,