Insights

Most global businesses today are looking to innovate, develop, and build products on the cloud – securely and at an accelerated pace – a key deciding factor for their business continuity and success. 

This blog post will explore the rising importance and adoption of DevSecOps and Cloud environments and how ThoughtFocus’ Digital Security Framework can help you meet the rising digital security challenges.

But before, a few stats – 

Global end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 21.7% to total $597.3 billion in 2023, up from $491 billion in 2022 – Gartner 

The DevSecOps market size is projected to reach USD 41.66 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 30.76% from 2022 to 2030.- As per VerifiedMarketResearch 

A recent Gitlab report says, DevOps teams are running more security scans than ever before: over half run SAST scans, 44% run DAST, and around 50% scan containers and dependencies. And 70% of security team members say security has shifted left.  

Importance of innovating and building products on the cloud in a secure way – 

It becomes all too essential to safeguard data, mitigate threats, meet compliance requirements, earn customer trust, and enable rapid innovation. By prioritizing security throughout the development process, organizations can leverage the benefits of cloud technology while ensuring the integrity and protection of their products and services. All this, without hindering rapid product development or time-to-market, allows for faster iterations and releases while maintaining robust security measures. 

The very premise of any cloud solution should be – to provide solid security and velocity in digital development, including –   

• Implementing strategies such as integrating standard security practices into the DevOps workflow 
• Leveraging automated security testing tools 
• Adopting a “shift-left security approach,” providing security training and awareness 

• Establishing a continuous monitoring and feedback loop 
• Fostering effective collaboration and communication between development, security, and operations teams.  

By integrating best security practices into the DevOps workflow, development teams can address security concerns throughout the development lifecycle, allowing for early detection and resolution of security issues without affecting development speed.  

Automated security testing tools can identify vulnerabilities, flag potential threats, and provide developers with actionable insights to rectify issues efficiently. A shift-left security approach focuses on addressing potential security flaws early in the development process, preventing security issues from becoming bottlenecks later in the development cycle. This approach ensures a smoother and faster development pace.  

Added, the ThoughtFocus Security Framework allows companies to build safely on the cloud without sacrificing velocity. Typically, it steers the effective use of security controls, facilitates the integration of security controls in development, utilizes automated guardrails, and API-driven evidence collection for compliance, and establishes shared application control sets for similar solutions. 

The right approach? 

To ensure cross-functional teams can innovate and build cloud-based products securely, a common control library called the Cloud Control Library is needed. This library simplifies all potential cloud controls into a common library, allowing organizations to group related controls across different public frameworks into one. This helps identify and catalog potential cloud-based resources and environments.  

However, not every product needs to adhere to all controls in the library. To satisfy security and compliance requirements for various categories of applications, application control subsets should be established. These subsets allow product teams to focus solely on the required security areas for their product. These subsets can be templated and automated, eliminating the need to recreate the wheel for every new application/product. 

For instance, an Azure-hosted application processing PCI data can be a standalone Application Control Subset, containing all necessary controls from the Cloud Control Library for PCI compliance. This allows other teams to incorporate PCI processing into their product, reducing time to market and increasing velocity which is one of the keys to business continuity and success. 

By utilizing the pre-defined standard operating procedures, the organization can streamline its solution and meet PCI compliance requirements. 

Marching forward 

A shared responsibility model is essential for navigating security and compliance controls in digital transformation. This model requires shared handling of customers’ digital assets between organizations and customers, improving security and enabling automation for greater flexibility and efficiency.  

A product approach is used to break down responsibility, improving digital capabilities regularly and consistently changing who is accountable. This reduces the time to deliver new products by following established operating procedures and automation. 

While platform teams must ensure an effective universal way of describing who is accountable for doing what, as demonstrated by AWS. This model is not static, and changes based on feature functionality, cloud services, and modified versions. All teams in digital must understand their responsibility and communicate it to their clients or teams.  

ThoughtFocus’ Digital Security Framework offers a secure cloud environment, incorporating a Cloud Control Library, Application Control Subsets, Shared Responsibility Models, and automation of patterns across application control sets.  

Looking for a reliable partner who can build secure, high-quality digital products and apps that meet your faster time-to-market goals? Our team of engineers from cloud and DevSecOps can help come up with the right strategy and solution. Drop us a line at betterfuturefaster@thoughtfocus.com to ensure your software follows the best quality standards and we will prioritize your request.