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As the threat landscape grows increasingly sophisticated with each passing day, it is high time for businesses to deploy security strategies that propagate cybersecurity, all the while enabling organizations to maintain a streamlined workflow. Considering the severity of some of the threats facing companies today, perhaps the most significant step that companies can take towards better cybersecurity is to consider security as an issue concerning the entire organization, rather than just the SOC team.
By altering employees' attitudes towards cybersecurity within organizations, companies can put a much-needed spin on the notion of security and turn it into an organization-wide responsibility. To further put this into perspective, let's consider the example of an IT company developing custom applications or client software. For the development, the last thing that operations or development teams want to deal with is the prospect of a supply chain attack or a similar vulnerability that threatens to topple the entire project over. Businesses now need a security strategy that accounts for the implications of cyberattacks, threats, and vulnerabilities, right from the start and carries it throughout the development cycle.
Furthermore, as an increasing number of businesses rely on cloud computing systems for data storage and the management of operations and resources, they face a plethora of 'new' security risks, making the arduous task of applying an effective security strategy even more laborious to accomplish. With the amalgamation of the cloud within modern enterprises, cybercriminals now have a much larger attack surface available. The vulnerabilities arise from multiple endpoints, applications which increases the need for an integrated security methodology. It is where SecOps comes in to save the day.
This article delves deep into everything related to SecOps. If you're a security enthusiast or a business owner worried about the fragile state of the cybersecurity landscape, you've clicked on the right place.
Before defining SecOps, you must clearly understand its much better-known counterpart, DevOps. There have been many debates over the exact nature of the term 'DevOps,' with some arguing it is a culture. In contrast, others believe it to be an adjective used to describe specific tools, technologies, and jobs following particular criteria. Perhaps the easiest way to define DevOps would be to tell it as AWS does, which states that DevOps is an amalgamation of "cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increase an organization's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity."
Similar to DevOps, which sees collaboration between the development and operations teams for a more streamlined workflow, SecOps, at its very core, is a collaborative approach between security and IT operations to foster cybersecurity within the organization. As with DevOps, there is much vagueness surrounding SecOps and its role within modern-day enterprises. SecOps role largely depends on the size and structure of an organization. From there onwards, SecOps can vary from a management methodology implemented throughout the company to a procedure integrated exclusively to a specific IT project.
However, the critical aspect of SecOps entails that teams consider security at the beginning stages and throughout each phase of planning and development to ensure that no security vulnerability is left undealt with. With the implementation of DevOps, organizations move away from a siloed approach, in which the development and operations teams work independently of each other. Instead, by relying on the philosophy of DevOps, companies create a single DevOps team, which is equipped with the ability to respond quickly to workflow challenges. Typically, DevOps teams respond to hindrances in workflow by integrating tools, practices, and effective automation and tooling at the center of the development cycle.
While the primary goal of DevOps is to streamline an organization's workflow, the implementation of SecOps prioritizes security over a high-velocity workflow. Fundamentally, SecOps seeks to improve an organization's security infrastructure by integrating security and automation across each phase of the development lifecycle and increasing visibility, accountability, and response at each stage.
Since the primary goal of SecOps is to improve an organization's cybersecurity infrastructure through a collaborative effort of the security and operations team, it relies on integrating automation, which has been deemed by many as the 'key' to standardizing and simplifying security procedures. SecOps teams must rely on automation tools to scale your company's growth. Additionally, to fulfill the goal of SecOps as quickly as possible, it is also critical that all the members of the SecOps team should work in coordination with each other throughout the operational playing field.
The implementation of the SecOps model results in several advantages to an organization's business outlook, particularly in regards to the cybersecurity concerns they face. Since the primary goal of SecOps is to improve a company's security posture, organizations naturally meet a minimized risk of data breaches and other types of cyberattacks, a spike in response times, and consumer confidence, which usually results in increased revenue generation.
Moreover, since SecOps depends heavily on automation, organizations can expect to see a spike in the overall productivity of their employees since the day-to-day menial tasks are being carried out through automation. Additionally, integrating automation practices also boosts collaboration, ultimately leading to more transparent accountability and reporting of threats, which increases the chances of them being eradicated timely.
In addition to the benefits that automation within SecOps offers, opting for a highly integrated approach reduces expenses on security measures such as staffing an ever-increasing SOC team amidst a market suffering from an acute shortage of security talent. Furthermore, with SecOps, where security is integrated throughout each phase, teams can deploy patches faster and more frequently. In the long run, this results in more stable code being released and a significant decrease in downtime and problem reports.
In the highly likely instance that you choose to implement SecOps in an organization unfamiliar with the DevOps methodology, you'll have to be very careful with the practices you adopt to implement SecOps within your company. Since you'll be starting from the very beginning of your organization's operational lifecycle, the slightest mistake could result in catastrophic consequences, which is why exercising caution is so crucial.
Once you've decided to amalgamate SecOps within your organization, you'll need to start the arduous process by conducting a thorough risk audit.
A risk audit refers to the process of analyzing the threats affecting your organization. This includes supply chain vulnerabilities, data theft, espionage, cyberattacks, along disgruntled employees acting as malicious agents on your company's network. All in all, before you can implement SecOps within your organization, assessing all the risk factors is critical to ensure success for the long term.
Prioritize the various risks you've discovered based on a variety of factors. The most significant step that you can take to aid the prioritization of specific threats over others is to start by asking the right questions.
Let's consider the example of an outage within your cloud infrastructure, which is almost sure to result in a loss of business operations. While a broken cloud system renders an organization unable to maintain its business front, the chances of it taking place are incredibly minimal. Compare this to the risk of a data breach, which occurs far more frequently, and you'll gain some valuable insights into which threats to prioritize.
Hopefully, by the end of the article, you've cleared up any doubts that you might have been harboring about SecOps. As is the case with implementing any 'new' approach, organizations need to ensure that the methodology is welcomed across the entire company, instead of just the SecOps and DevOps teams.
