Getting Started with Secure DevOps
Deploy faster by embedding visibility and security
Visibility into application health and security allows you to stay focused on shipping cloud apps. In reality, as teams set up development processes they often prioritize developing and deploying applications, leaving the details of managing application health, security, and compliance until later.
What Slows You Down?
Reacting to performance and availability issues pulls your team away from development work. If security and compliance controls are not integrated into your workflow, they can slow you down. Issues may be identified as you release to production, adding churn.
Automating and integrating tools accelerates DevOps
Elite DevOps teams, based on software delivery and operational performance metrics, automate and integrate more tools into their toolchains. This concept is well recognized in the monitoring domain, but not as much in security. While 57% of elite teams have integration with production monitoring and observability tools, only 31% have automated security tests.[1]
Although integrating security lags monitoring today, regulatory and internal policies requirements eventually require teams to address security and compliance as part of their DevOps workflow.
Secure DevOps
Secure DevOps, also known as DevSecOps, brings security and monitoring throughout the application lifecycle, from development through production. This sets you up to deliver applications that are secure, stable, and high performing.
This workflow plugs into your existing tool chain and provides a single source of truth across DevOps, developer, and security teams to maximize efficiency. The SaaS-first foundation, simple user experience, and out-of-the-box workflows enable you to get started quickly with monitoring and security in containers and Kubernetes.
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Five Essential Workflows for Secure Devops
Image Scanning
- Scan for known software vulnerabilities taking into account any third-party libraries developers might be pulling in.
- Embed scanning into CI/CD pipelines and registries. Leverage Kubernetes admission controllers to prevent risky image deployment.
- Integrate with Open Policy Agent (OPA) for advanced policy decisions.
- Validate the build configuration (Dockerfile instructions) and image attributes (like size, labels, etc.).
- Identify new vulnerabilities across large multi-cloud Kubernetes deployments and alert teams quickly.
- Adopt local scanning and maintain full control of your images.
Runtime Security
- Use a set of predefined policies to detect anomalous activity at runtime.
- Leverage an open-source runtime detection tool, like Falco, that provides community-driven rules for common security frameworks (MITRE ATT&CK, FIM, cryptomining, etc.)
- Use rich cloud/Kubernetes context to apply precise policies and reduce noise.
- Automatically remediate with response actions to pause or kill containers to block threats.
Compliance
- Validate compliance using out-of-the-box rules mapped against common compliance frameworks including PCI, NIST, etc.
- Leverage CIS benchmarks for Docker and Kubernetes to ensure that you’re following security best practices (e.g., don’t run privileged containers, don’t run containers as root)
Application and Cloud Service Monitoring
- Use pre-built dashboard templates for your backend services.
- Get to root causes faster by correlating application performance to your Kubernetes infrastructure.
- Leverage your existing developer investment with full Prometheus compatibility.
- Save time with curated and supported Prometheus integrations to monitor applications and cloud services.
Kubernetes and Container Monitoring
- Auto-discover and explore your container, cloud, and Kubernetes environments.
- Use out-of-the-box dashboards to visualize the performances of your applications and containers.
- Easily configure alerting across nodes, namespaces, clusters, metrics, and tags.
- Reduce cost by optimizing resource usage and capacity.
Embed Advanced Workflows with Containers and Kubernetes
- Advanced Troubleshooting - Reduce MTTR by examining granular, system-level capture data, and detailed topology maps to troubleshoot hard-to-diagnose issues
- ML-based anomaly detection - Reduce the manual effort in creating runtime policies at scale with machine learning-based image profiling
- Threat prevention - Block threats using native controls in Kubernetes that do not impact performance
- Incident response and forensics - Conduct deep forensics, even after the container is gone, by using a snapshot of pre- and post-attack activity that includes system calls with Kubernetes and cloud context
- Extended compliance controls - Leverage 400+ out-of-the-box checks to help you continuously validate compliance against a broad range of controls
Pick a SaaS-first platform for efficiency and faster innovation
Choosing a SaaS-based solution over an on-prem solution has many benefits:
Scalable service: You can start with monitoring and securing a few images, and scale up as your container applications grow without worrying about backend data management.
Fast implementation: You can quickly plug into your DevOps tools (i.e. embed scanning into your CI/CD pipelines) and get up and running in minutes, unlike on-premises applications that require more time to install and setup.
Easy upgrades and maintenance: The SaaS provider handles patches and rolls out new feature updates that don’t require you to manually upgrade.
No infrastructure or staff costs: You avoid paying for in-house hardware and software licenses with perpetual ownership. You also don’t need staff on-site to maintain and support the application.
Sysdig Secure DevOps Platform
Infrastructure as Code Validation
- Block risky configs
- Auto-remediate at the source
Vulnerability Management
- Scan in CI/CD and registries
- Block risky images
- Prioritize vulns using runtime context
Configuration and Permission Management
- Detect cloud misconfigurations
- Enforce least privilege access
- Use OPA to apply consistent policies
Threat
Detection
- Use Falco to detect threats, drift, config changes, and runtime vulns
- Implement K8s native microsegmentation
Incident
response
- Capture detailed record for forensics
- Remediate config issues
- Block malicious activity
Compliance (PCI, NIST, SOC 2 and others)
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Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is secure DevOps?
A: Secure DevOps, also referred to as DevSecOps, is the discipline of safeguarding the DevOps environment and includes practices for security checks and reviews throughout the software production life cycle including build, run, test, release, and maintenance.
Q: What is the difference between DevOps and secure DevOps?
A: DevOps and secure DevOps use similar methodologies, automation and collaboration through the cycles of software development. Secure DevOps embeds security into the DevOps workflow to manage risk without slowing down application delivery.
Q: What is continuous cloud security posture management?
A: Continuous cloud security posture management combines static checks and continuous cloud threat detection in a single workflow. Reduce risk by correlating cloud misconfigurations (via configuration metadata through the cloud APIs) and risky behavior across accounts and services (via cloud activity logs such as AWS CloudTrail, GCP audit logs)
Footnotes