Developers and operation team members often find themselves in situations where they could easily adopt an existing open source tool or third-party library to implement functionality. While it is always a good practice to approach these decisions with a build versus buy mindset and not reinvent the wheel, usage of such external code bases can lead to unknown risk exposures. It might as well be the case that a library that is safe to use now might not be safe enough with future release iterations. In the Rolling out a test CI/CD workflow for DevSecOps section, we will cover some security tools that scan the code against public vulnerability databases (such as National Vulnerability Database (NVD)) that are continuously updated. This drastically improves the awareness of everyone involved in the delivery of code. In addition to identifying risks, most of these tools also help the developers with suggestions on how to immediately fix the vulnerability.

Being aware of such problems is a great benefit that comes with the adoption of integrated security practices advocated by DevSecOps.

Note A good example that fits here is the zero-day Log4j vulnerability from 2021, which exposed security loopholes in the Log4j logging utility, commonly used in Java programs. If you were not exposed to this news, I recommend reading more about it athttps://builtin.com/ cybersecurity/log4j-vulerability-explained.

Develop new features with confidence

While security is an ongoing process, the feedback that’s received via automated validations and code checks helps fix problems sooner, resulting in increased confidence in software developers. They can trust the scans performed by multiple tools in the delivery chain and be at least confident about a minimum baseline of security posture being met.

Improved compliance in regulated environments

Regulated industries such as pharmaceuticals, defense, and aerospace follow traditional development practices that involve a lot of manual testing procedures. To comply with multiple regulations and standards, it becomes difficult for them to release code changes at a scale similar to how other non-regulated companies, with fewer things to worry about, would do. This has a direct impact on the release velocity and productivity of the software teams.

Additionally, they need to maintain software applications for a much longer time, and the changes in the underlying platform and infrastructure warrant the need for continuous evaluation procedures that can be repeated even for the smallest of code changes.