Cloud-native applications are highly distributed systems. These modern applications require multiple teams, and naturally, the teams need collaboration to make the project successful.

DevOps is a cultural movement that seeks to reduce the friction and break the silos between Development and Operations teams. By collaborating, the teams have visibility on each other, and as a result, they start to trust each other. 

Unfortunately, many times we mix automation with DevOps. If the teams adopt automation without changing the culture of trusting each other, it is just engineering. Think of a scenario in which you use AWS API to provision an EC2 instance. Your team collaborates with the AWS team to provision a virtual machine instance. You trust the AWS team for this task and use the API to collaborate.

 With the adoption of DevOps, development teams have experienced improved velocity by collaborating with the operations team. So what’s the next area of improvement? Security. The same pattern applies. Security becomes the bottleneck because they have less visibility in the DevOps process and collaboration. DevOps is about keeping the systems running reliably. Security is about the prevention of risks. 

DevSecOps is about collaborating with security teams at every project lifecycle stage. The entire DevSecOps team collaborate on how to reduce or remove the security related risks. The team will find and mitigate security risks earlier in the development process. On example is that the team can perform security related checks early in the project lifecycle and automate them as the team scales. This may include vulnerability scanning of dependencies, static code analysis, code signing and observability practices. The security team will help to build a reliable software supply chain right form the beginning in the process

Good DevSecOps practices can potentially save the organisation thousands of dollars on cost, improve brand reputation and customer loyalty, and help react to competitor offerings quickly by releasing new product offerings fast.

Organisations that adopt a DevSecOps approach will be able to deliver their digital products and application faster and more securer with fewer issues. It improves collaboration and transparency between team members. The team can identify design flaws and vulnerabilities early on in the lifecycle, which can substantially reduce cost and development time.