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DevSecOps: From Culture to ROI

Shweta Khare

Wednesday, Sep 11th, 2024

DevSecOps: It sounds like a dream team, right? But the reality is often a bit more... challenging. When companies try to bring together development and security, it's like trying to mix oil and water. There are organizational roadblocks, cultural clashes, and technical headaches that can make the whole process feel like a never-ending uphill battle.

The challenges of adopting DevSecOps may seem insurmountable. Is adopting DevSecOps worth the effort?

Yes. One hundred percent.

DevSecOps impacts your development culture and boosts the effectiveness of your operations. These benefits ultimately improve your bottom line.

In this post, we’ll look at the financial impact of adopting DevSecOps. Then, we’ll explore the practical side of how to build DevSecOps culture and practices in your organization. We’ll see that what begins with a shift in culture has a ripple effect that translates to significant ROI.

The financial impact: why DevSecOps is worth the effort

DevSecOps integrates security into a DevOps methodology. Going beyond simply merging development and operation concerns, DevSecOps weaves security into the entire software development lifecycle (SDLC) as an integral thread. What financial impact does this approach have?

Fewer security incidents: A 2023 report from Gartner found that 66% of respondents’ organizations experienced fewer security incidents after adopting DevSecOps. When security becomes a priority at design, implementation, and testing, fewer flaws make their way to the build pipeline—and even fewer still ever reach production.
Early detection of issues: Prioritizing security means catching issues earlier in the SLDC, and issues caught earlier are less costly to fix. Consider the cost difference between fixing an SQLi flaw at coding time versus managing a data breach caused by SQLi in production. It’s no surprise that IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023 found that organizations with high DevSecOps adoption saved $1.68 million because of better security testing.
More efficient incident response: Teams that adopt DevSecOps practices are better equipped to minimize downtime and damage during a security event.
Improved regulatory compliance: A DevSecOps methodology means continuously monitoring systems to detect and remediate compliance violations, whether internal or external. Maintaining compliance helps organizations avoid financial penalties and build trust among stakeholders. The same report from Gartner referenced above found 58% of DevSecOps-adopting organizations had improved compliance scores.

Ultimately, DevSecOps helps organizations achieve their broader business objectives. By fortifying its security posture, an organization demonstrates a commitment to protecting its systems and its customers. Customer trust and business reputation hinge on prioritizing security. In addition, DevSecOps brings a competitive advantage by improving security and processes throughout the SDLC, leading to a faster time-to-market.

Fostering a DevSecOps culture

Facing the challenges of adopting DevSecOps in your organization begins at the level of culture. Before business units, teams, or engineers will buy into DevSecOps practices, they must first embrace a DevSecOps culture. This means fostering a culture of collaboration, shared responsibility, and continuous learning.

Establish a collective security mindset in your organization. Guard against siloed approaches to the SDLC. Instead, ensure that your security team and development team interact frequently. Foster an organizational culture where security is considered a shared responsibility across engineering units.

Train and educate every business unit in your organization to understand and appreciate the role they have in security. Certainly, the infrastructure or QA teams might easily see the relationship between their work and security. However, other teams—product, customer success, and HR—have a role to play too.

Building a DevSecOps culture is like building a bridge between the development and security teams. It's all about better communication and teamwork. Once everyone's on the same page, it's easier to tackle those security challenges and get things done.

Implementing DevSecOps practices

DevSecOps practices may vary in their details from one organization to the next. However, broadly speaking, organizations that adopt DevSecOps have established at least the following three practices.

Cross-functional collaboration

Collaboration among teams in practice stems directly from how an organization fosters a culture of collaboration. When development, security, and operations teams communicate and collaborate more regularly, this improves threat modeling. Threat modeling involves analyzing potential threats to the system, understanding their implications, and planning defenses against these threats.

Cross-functional team collaboration introduces diverse perspectives and specialized skillsets to threat modeling and security planning.

Security automation

As automation is fundamental to DevOps, automating security checks is fundamental to DevSecOps. Applied at continuous integration (CI) tooling, security automation means employing Security-as-Code (SaC). SaC codifies security measures so that they can be version-controlled and tested. Then, continuously and regularly, an application can be subjected to a consistent and robust suite of security tests every time a code change is introduced.

Along with checking code, security automation can continuously apply threat modeling and analyze an application with the latest threat intelligence data. With the right application protection tools in place, security checks are always on, always current.

Metrics-driven improvement

In today's complex world, organizations need a laser-sharp focus on security. DevSecOps is the answer, and metrics are the compass. By tracking the right KPIs – like vulnerabilities, incident response time, and downtime – you can get a real-time snapshot of your security posture. And when you see a problem? Fix it, fast. That's the beauty of DevSecOps: it's all about continuous improvement, making sure your security is always a step ahead.

Steer your enterprise toward DevSecOps maturity

The challenges of adopting DevSecOps in your enterprise are real, but they are not insurmountable. Investing the time and resources to overcome those challenges is worthwhile, as mature DevSecOps-practicing organizations see tangible and substantial financial benefits.

To steer your enterprise toward this end, take this road map:

Build the foundation: Begin by establishing a strong, security-minded culture in your organization. Foster cross-functional team collaboration that begins looking for ways to integrate security measures throughout the SDLC.
Implement automation: Find steps in your SDLC that would benefit from automated security testing. Integrate tools into your CI/CD pipeline to automate vulnerability scanning, software supply chain security, container image scanning, and more.
Employ advanced threat detection: Use tools that implement threat intelligence and advanced analytics to identify and respond to sophisticated attacks.
Leverage a cloud native security platform: Adopt a cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) as a fully integrated solution to securing your cloud-based applications and infrastructure.
Encourage continuous improvement: Continue fostering a culture of continuous learning and adaptation, applied concretely through metrics gathering and iterative process improvements.

DevSecOps has become a strategic imperative for modern enterprises. The complexity of cloud native applications coupled with the growing sophistication of modern cyberthreats means security can no longer be second fiddle in your organization.

Panoptica is a feature-rich, enterprise-ready CNAPP solution with DevSecOps capabilities. It provides comprehensive tooling for security, compliance, and monitoring that modern enterprises adopt as they make their DevSecOps journey. Learn more about Panoptica by scheduling a live demo or signing up to use it today