Securing DevOps by Default… Not as a Patch

What if airtight security measures were built into your DevOps processes by design, from conception, and not shoe-horned in after the fact? What if passwords weren’t built into scripts and uploaded to GitHub for all to see? What if an entire DevOps team could work seamlessly and efficiently without ever needing to stop and authenticate each step?

Imagine your DevOps could be DevSecOps…. by default.

DevOps Challenges to Security

It’s an unfortunate fact that DevOps teams represent a significant security risk for businesses. One of the biggest reasons is the simplest of all: efficiency. Organizations of all shapes and sizes are under ever-increasing pressure to deliver, and DevOps teams are no exception. And when the pressure is on to generate code and push releases, security is sacrificed in the name of efficiency.

Imagine you’re working in a spreadsheet, thousands of lines long, carefully compiling your data. Now imagine you needed to enter your username and password each time you hit “enter” on a cell. It’s this tedium and redundancy that DevOps often try to avoid, choosing instead to hard-code their credentials into scripts to sidestep the need to repeatedly enter passwords thousands of times a day. Yet hard-coding passwords, naturally, exposes them – and the larger organization – to a huge risk of a system breach.

A simple DevOps workaround becomes the root of a major security breach.

With passwords were written into scripts left on public GitHub repositories, even the laziest hacker could gain access to your IT infrastructure. Even further, with the privileged credentials they’ve now acquired, they could jump from one resource to the next making lateral moves across your network potentially accessing confidential information or highly-sensitive data. With this kind of access, production could be shut down or customer data could be sold to the highest bidder. A simple DevOps workaround becomes the root of a major security breach.

DevSecOps: Built-In IT Security

So how do you facilitate DevOps processes without compromising data security? How do you make DevOps secure by design?

Enter, Application-to-Application Password Management.

An integral part of a privileged access management (PAM) solution, AAPM totally eliminates the need for credentials to be entered at each step, let alone hard-coded. A digital password vault stores credentials and offers multi-layer security within automated verification procedures so authentication is quick and DevOps production hardly skips a beat.

Beyond securing applications and code, PAM offers a number of valuable assets to DevSecOps. When a dozen developers are all working on the same application, it can be critical to follow change history. When the code breaks or a service goes down, Session Management offers detailed, play-by-play insight into who accessed what took what actions (including OCR recording of command-line activity), and when it all occurred. Holding teams accountable for their actions is critical in a fast-paced DevOps environment.

PAM, Data Security & DevOps

DevOps is now indispensable for businesses in today’s digital world. Secure DevOps, or DevSecOps, is non-negotiable for organizations looking to fulfill deliverables and meet compliance requirements. Doing so efficiently requires a simplified approach to cybersecurity that streamlines security and keeps teams agile – it requires PAM.

What can Privileged Access Management do for DevOps?

• Eliminate hard-coded passwords
• Facilitate credential management for scripts and applications
• Protect access and credentials to accounts for populating systems
• Automate administration & credential rotation
• Control and trace privileged access to ensure accountability
• Facilitate end-to-end data encryption

Learn more about how DevOps can become DevSecOps in our whitepaper: Is Your Enterprise DevOps-Native Ready?