Securing operations in the cloud can seem daunting. To protect your organization, you need to have the proper preventative and reactive safeguards in place at every step of the software development cycle. But it doesn’t have to be as complex as it sounds.
This blog outlines how to secure the entire software development lifecycle, emphasizing the “shift left” approach, which aims to catch vulnerabilities and issues early in the development process to reduce both risks and costs.
Key security principles for the development lifecycle
Integrating security checks at every stage helps developers to identify and resolve issues early using development tools like Visual Studio Code (VSCode), Jenkins, and GitHub Actions. By embedding security feedback into developer environments and tools, such as Jira and GitHub Issues, you can address vulnerabilities quickly and integrate security into the development process — not add it on at the end.
The key security principles implemented across the development lifecycle are:
- Defense in depth: Security is layered throughout the pipeline, ensuring that vulnerabilities are detected at multiple points — whether during development, in CI/CD pipelines, or at runtime. This reduces the chances of a vulnerability slipping through the cracks.
- Least privilege: This principle ensures that users and services have the minimum necessary permissions to reduce the attack surface. Developers must be able to detect and fix over-permissioned roles or configurations to mitigate potential risks.
- Zero trust: Every component is continuously verified at each stage to ensure that only trusted elements are deployed to production. Monitoring for any anomalies or unauthorized activity — even at runtime — is vital.
- Security by default: By embedding secure practices from the outset, you can ensure that security is considered early in the development process, preventing misconfigurations and reducing the likelihood of introducing vulnerabilities.
- Continuous compliance: Automated security scans ensure that applications and infrastructure continuously adhere to security standards, catching new vulnerabilities as they emerge and preventing security drift over time.
Sysdig integrates with immutable infrastructure and declarative infrastructure as code (IaC) to maintain consistency and traceability, reducing configuration drift across environments. It supports the fast-paced development of cloud-native applications, such as microservices, by ensuring security checks do not slow down the development process. This includes runtime threat detection to identify zero-day vulnerabilities and suspicious behavior in real time.
Developers use Sysdig to scan for misconfigurations and vulnerabilities during development, utilizing extensions like the Visual Studio Code plugin or the Sysdig CLI Scanner. For IaC, Sysdig ensures compliance with standards like CIS Benchmarks and NIST SP 800-53 and helps implement best practices such as least privilege and proper secrets management.
Integrating Sysdig with Git repositories enables automatic detection of misconfigurations and vulnerabilities, offering remediation patches through pull requests to help maintain secure code. Sysdig also scans CI/CD pipelines, such as GitHub, GitLab, or Jenkins, to catch lingering issues in both application code and infrastructure before deployment. This includes checking container images for vulnerabilities, ensuring they comply with security policies, and blocking insecure deployments.
The stages of the software lifecycle, and how Sysdig keeps them safe
- Infrastructure as code (IaC): Sysdig checks for IaC misconfigurations, ensuring that insecure infrastructure setups are prevented from reaching production. It also helps enforce a security-first mindset throughout development.
- Container and image security: Sysdig scans images and container builds for issues such as outdated OS-level dependencies, misconfigured secrets, and insecure settings.
- Registry and Artifact repository: At these stages, Sysdig ensures that only secure, trusted images are deployed by continuously scanning them for vulnerabilities.
- Runtime security: At runtime, Sysdig offers continuous monitoring to detect vulnerabilities and suspicious behavior across environments such as standalone hosts, Kubernetes, and serverless platforms. For Kubernetes, Sysdig uses role-based access control (RBAC) and monitors audit logs to detect incidents.
- CIEM (cloud infrastructure entitlement management): Sysdig also manages cloud permissions by enforcing least privilege and minimizing excessive permissions to reduce the risk of privilege escalation attacks.
Sysdig provides end-to-end security by integrating automated checks and remediation into the development pipeline, supporting developers in maintaining a secure, compliant environment. By securing all stages of the software lifecycle — development, deployment, and runtime — Sysdig provides end-to-end security so developers can maintain a secure, compliant environment at every step.
Want to learn more? Check out our infographic, The Grand Atlas of Software Security: What you need at every stage of the pipeline.