DevOps vs DevSecOps: The Difference Explained

DevOps vs DevSecOps: The Difference Explained

DevOps and DevSecOps are two very popular terms in the IT industry today. To an outsider, they might seem complicated, unclear, and very similar. In reality, there are important differences between the two, and they are not as difficult to understand as they may appear.

It is vital to know the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps, as this can help teams make decisions that boost the efficiency of their application development pipeline. In this article, we will explain what are DevOps and DevSecOps, and what their similarities and differences are.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a double abbreviation, with the Dev part indicating software development and the Ops part meaning IT operations. Therefore, DevOps is the abbreviation of software development operations. And as the name says, it is a methodology that integrates software development and IT operations. With DevOps, developers can deliver software more quickly by enabling collaboration and automation, controlling product infrastructure better, and prioritizing software performance and delivery. DevOps includes continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment.

What is SecOps?

Another piece of the DevSecOps puzzle is SecOps. Its first part, Sec, refers to cybersecurity, while Ops refers to IT operations, as above. SecOps is focused on increasing cybersecurity in all development stages, constantly improving security, and dividing responsibility for security to all involved parties.

What is DevSecOps?

Finally, DevSecOps is a combination of the two things we have already mentioned. It represents a set of practices for securing software, infrastructure, applications, and data in enterprises. With DevSecOps, security is automatically integrated into every phase of the software development lifecycle. Additionally, the security of the application and the infrastructure becomes a shared responsibility of IT tasks groups, development, and security, instead of everything falling on the shoulder of the security silo.

The similarities

While DevOps and DevSecOps are different, there are also some similarities between them:

• Collaboration: both DevOps and DevSecOps require different teams within an organization to work together and communicate regularly.
• Monitoring: DevOps and DevSecOps rely on collected app data in order to learn how to improve its performance and security and minimize its attack surface.
• Automation: both these methodologies use AI for the automation of various process steps. For example, both DevOps and DevSecOps use anomaly detection to identify issues, threats, and vulnerabilities.

The differences

Before DevSecOps, security was something developers didn’t even consider, because it wasn’t their job. With the introduction of DevSecOps, security practices have been integrated into the DevOps framework, and everything changed. DevSecOps shifted the focus from increasing the frequency of deployments to prioritizing app security.

Secure coding has become increasingly relevant and there are now many ways to guarantee that an app isn’t vulnerable. Still, this doesn’t mean developers must now also be experts in security. Instead, DevSecOps teams will create smaller, security-focused teams of experts, dedicated to discovering issues in applications. These smaller teams will inform the development team of the problems they have found, so they can be addressed.

Another important difference between DevOps and DevSecOps relates to the activities that define them. DevOps includes continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment, infrastructure as a code (IaC), and microservices. DevSecOps includes all of the mentioned activities, plus automated security testing, test modeling, incident management, and common weakness enumeration (CWE).

Conclusion

Deciding whether to stick to DevOps or switch to DevSecOps is a completely individual decision. However, DevSecOps can make your software production more secure, without lengthening the development lifecycle or putting your organization's assets at risk.

If you want to know more about DevOps in general, DevOps assessment, automation or management:

• visit our devops service page;
• give us a call at +385 1 3141 562;
• contact our sales department at sales@heptabit.com.

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