{"id":14328,"date":"2024-07-10T11:37:16","date_gmt":"2024-07-10T10:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ee.yelkdev.site\/?p=14328"},"modified":"2024-12-09T21:07:32","modified_gmt":"2024-12-09T21:07:32","slug":"devsecops-balancing-speed-security-and-user-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.equalexperts.com\/blog\/our-thinking\/devsecops-balancing-speed-security-and-user-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"DevSecOps: Balancing speed, security and user experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

How can organisations leverage DevSecOps to create a customer-centric approach?<\/p>\n

The landscape of modern business operations demands agility, reliability, and security in equal measure. While cybersecurity remains a critical concern, the integration of DevSecOps practices has emerged as a pivotal strategy for organisations seeking to fortify their digital infrastructure while accelerating innovation.<\/p>\n

At the heart of DevSecOps lies a transformative ethos: the seamless convergence of development, operations, and security functions. This integration isn’t merely about thwarting threats but fundamentally reshaping how teams collaborate and deliver value. It’s a cultural shift that champions iterative development, continuous integration, and rapid deployment, all while safeguarding against potential vulnerabilities.<\/p>\n

Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss DevSecOps as part of the Konnecta Ko-Lab Series 2 event<\/a> in Sydney. At the event, I discussed how organisations can embed DevSecOps practices and the importance of creating a customer-centric culture.<\/p>\n

Supporting engineering teams to adopt DevSecOps<\/h2>\n

One of the biggest barriers to successful DevSecOps initiatives is the entrenched processes within organisations. Most companies operate in silos, where the success of each team is measured by domain-specific metrics. Development teams may be measured on the speed of feature delivery, product teams on net promoter scores (NPS), and security teams on incident response time.<\/p>\n

To overcome these barriers, organisations must cultivate a unified vision that places equal emphasis on feature delivery, operational efficiency, and security.<\/p>\n

While everyone agrees in principle that it is important to build secure and reliable systems, for many organisations there are few immediate and obvious incentives to do so.<\/p>\n

Creating a shared vision ensures that every team member embraces their role in delivering secure, reliable, user-centric solutions. Without this, every initiative will trade off non-functional and security requirements first. You can find out more about how this can work in practice in our Secure Delivery Playbook<\/a>.<\/p>\n

User-centred security<\/h2>\n

Encouraging teams to integrate security within their delivery practices can be aided by focusing more on users. While user-centric design practices are becoming increasingly common in organisations, user-centric security hasn\u2019t yet gained the same prominence.<\/p>\n

Concepts such as compliance, governance, and corporate risk are incredibly important to consider during delivery but rarely resonate with everyone in the business who has a say on how work should be prioritised.<\/p>\n

When a cyber-attack occurs, it can result in service interruptions, reputational damage or financial penalties for a company. But customers aren’t merely bystanders in the event of a cyber-attack; they’re the true victims.<\/p>\n

They are the person whose bank account was blocked as a fraud prevention measure, they are the person who couldn\u2019t book an important appointment because the system was unavailable.<\/p>\n

Framing the challenges and outcomes in this way helps all team members see security-related processes as a priority, rather than a blocker or an afterthought.<\/p>\n

Balancing security and delivery speed<\/h2>\n

One of the key questions at the Konnecta event focused on how organisations can balance DevSecOps with delivery speed – whilst staying \u201cahead of the curve\u201d on cyber security threats.<\/p>\n

This is a challenging problem. Cybersecurity is a truly adversarial discipline \u2013 and it is a situation which is completely asymmetrical. An attacker has a known set of methods that they can attempt, and they need to win once. A defender has to protect against the unknown and must win every time.<\/p>\n

Traditional information security values, including defence in depth, least privilege, MFA, and threat detection are vital. More modern DevSecOps practices can strengthen your security posture:<\/p>\n