From the dev team scrum to the boardroom and even within the oval office, software security has emerged as a top priority. Yet, inside these organizations, teams are still struggling to determine who is actually responsible for it. A recent GitLab survey reveals about one-third of security professionals believe they are responsible, while at the same time nearly just as many (28%) say it’s everyone’s job to make sure software is secure. At the root of the issue? Silos between software development, operations and security teams, causing confusion over testing responsibilities and ownership of other crucial elements of software security.
To address these issues, a growing number of organizations are turning to DevSecOps. This newest evolution of DevOps shifts security left in the software dev cycle and spreads responsibility for it across developers, operations and security professionals. DevSecOps addresses security at every stage of software dev, instead of just during testing, to eliminate time-consuming and costly code revisions that impede the pace of software releases.
But, in order to truly make security a shared responsibility, organizations require collaborative tools that can knock down silos between teams and enable efficient teamwork for building software, especially as remote and distributed work remains the norm. Atlassian tools such as Jira Software, Confluence and Opsgenie not only bring distributed or siloed teams together under one roof, but also streamline workflows to enable even faster and more secure software releases.
Here are four ways organizations can use these tools to implement DevSecOps workflows and reimagine a more collaborative approach to app security.
1) Break Down Silos With a Single Source of Truth for Collaboration
DevSecOps reimagines security as a shared responsibility between developers, IT operations and security professionals. So it requires organizations to not only make a culture shift that prioritizes close collaboration, but also provide the tools and workflows for these teams to stay connected.
With more than 65,000 users, Jira is the most widely used agile project management solution, designed to provide all teams with a single source of truth for software planning, tracking and deploying. This tool creates a project roadmap for developers that keeps team members aligned from start to product release. In DevSecOps, this type of collaboration is critical to make sure the company’s security policies and checks are implemented throughout the entire dev process by everyone involved—making security a truly shared responsibility by all teams.
Jira’s robust platform comes equipped with numerous integrations for the most popular development tools available today (such as Scrum, Kaban or Bitbucket for deploying code quickly and reliably), as well as a rich set of features that allow organizations to fully customize their own highly collaborative DevSecOps workflows.
2) Use Documentation to Make Sure Everyone Stays on the Same Page
To break down old information silos, an easily accessible, centralized place to document ideas is crucial to remove bottlenecks and help previously-insulated teams work from a single source of truth.
Remote work has added another layer to this challenge, but Atlassian’s Confluence provides a secure and reliable way for distributed teams to collaborate on critical projects. Confluence provides a digital “knowledge base” for a company’s essential documents, which are protected by privacy controls and data encryption with industry-verified compliance standards.
With the right knowledge at their fingertips, teams can feel empowered to get answers about project security on their own, without hesitation or relying on a response from a colleague.
3) Build Automation into Testing and Monitoring
Application testing and security monitoring are two of the most important—but also most tedious—steps of the software development lifecycle. To ease this burden, DevSecOps principles call for automated processes to streamline these workflows and provide more layers of security checks and continuous detection to block potential attacks or roll a vulnerable app back to a previous state if needed.
Through the use of an incident management platform, such as Atlassian’s Opsgenie, organizations can better respond to critical issues before they have the chance to impact business operations. Teams can program Opsgenie to notify specific people (or even all users) if any security threats arise in existing infrastructure. This allows teams to respond more quickly, and also more collaboratively, to incidents in order to determine their source and stop them from becoming bigger issues.
4) Look to a DevSecOps Partner to Optimize Your Security Tools and Workflows
Atlassian tools can help close the gaps between teams to make security a shared responsibility. But fine-tuning these platforms to align with unique DevSecOps workflows can be a significant undertaking. To provide expert guidance on DevSecOps adoptions and make sure the setup of Atlassian tools is smooth and fruitful, organizations can turn to an experienced DevSecOps solutions partner like Contegix.
Contegix’s team of experts have deployed hundreds of custom Atlassian solutions designed to meet unique security needs. Contegix can perform the heavy-lifting of optimizing Atlassian tools to unlock the full benefits of customization, along with detailed DevSecOps assessments, coaching throughout the adoption process, ongoing support and governance oversight and also tool-specific training for teams.
With the help of a trusted DevSecOps solutions partner like Contegix, organizations looking to reimagine their approach to application security can receive the hands-on support they need to break down silos between teams, make security a shared responsibility and get up-and-running with efficient and cost-effective DevSecOps workflows.
Learn more about how Contegix can help you reimagine app security with DevSecOps.