DevOps vs DevSecOps: Major Similarities and Differences

Some situations in life give rise to unique words or terms that define our everyday activities. Think of ChatGPT, keyboards, artificial intelligence (AI), Chatops, touchscreens, homepages, and more.

What about DevOps and DevSecOps? They are classic words in software development familiar to IT professionals and software engineers. But what do they mean?

In this guide, Instatus explores the concepts in-depth, highlighting their major differences and similarities. And if you’re thinking of creating a status page to keep your customers up-to-date regarding their applications, Instatus can help.

Meanwhile, let’s look into the DevOps vs. DevSecOps debate.

DevSecOps vs DevOps: Key Differences

DevOps and DevSecOps may look similar, but they’re slightly different . Both are software development approaches with several differences but with one similar goal. So what is the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps? Let’s explore the concepts in the following sections.

Activities

DevOps aims to reduce the development life cycle and improve efficiency by ensuring software engineers, automated processes, and constant monitoring work together. It relies on the Scrum approach, which is a set of roles, meetings, and tools for IT teams to achieve a common goal.

Let’s delve into the common practices of DevOps teams:- As engineers write and patch code, there’s continuous automated and monitored code testing.

• The development life cycle’s planning and coding phases undergo continuous development.
• Constant checking to maintain the code in action and the basic infrastructure.
• Resolving bugs and handling incident response as part of quality assurance.

DevSecOps works alongside a CI/CD pipeline since the entire DevSecOps system needs security integration.

It must have security experts, use automation, and adhere to regular monitoring to function well.

Security checks are much more common in DevSecOps. For instance, checks might include:

• Precommit checks: An engineer uses a python-based tool to check their code before they submit it for code review.
• Commit-time checks: It’s a process that sends the latest source code changes to the repository. It also involves tracking metrics and automatic security testing, which is scanning software for vulnerabilities.
• Build-time checks: They occur when the code moves from development to production so that the code is free of known vulnerabilities.
• Test-time checks: They involve checking the code for malicious damage and occur after the build-time checks.
• Deploy-time checks: Security checks may happen between the time the code is ready and when it goes live.

Emphasis

DevOps focuses on software development at high speed.

On the other hand, DevSecOps seeks to incorporate security flawlessly into DevOps processes and software companies. It ensures engineers develop secure and compliant code to reduce downtime and loss of data.

Goal

DevOps primarily depends on collaboration, communication, and collective responsibility between IT specialists and app developers to improve business agility.

But DeSecOps builds on DevOps by integrating continuous security testing along the delivery pipeline. It relies on security automation tools to reduce risks by automating manual activities like vulnerability scanning.

Furthermore, DevSecOps detects vulnerabilities earlier in the app life cycle.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is when you blend tools, a set of operations, and cultural adoption in software engineering to deploy applications and services at top speed. It stands for software development (dev) and operations (ops) and streamlines collaboration between these processes.

Also, using DevOps loops helps launch your software faster, meet project timelines, and reduce bugs.

Let’s look at the key features of DevOps.

Automation

Automation plays a critical role in the software development cycle. It means automating testing, the deployment phase, update releases, and other labor-intensive activities. As a result, you can double productivity, catch and fix bugs effortlessly, and inject efficiency into the development process.

Also, automation reduces human errors in the software delivery process. For instance, it can install security updates in your environment, such as on your workstations, servers, and software. Automation ensures these components are up-to-date without human intervention.

Collaboration

Because teamwork is essential in DevOps, the IT and software development departments must collaborate, share ideas, and provide continuous feedback.

You can improve collaboration through cross-functional training. Ultimately, this partnership between the two departments can result in greater efficiency and better decisions.

Integration

Continuous integration (CI) is the practice of developing and testing code automatically when a contributor pushes code changes to version control. It enables DevOps engineers to combine code changes into a central repository to automate and test the code.

Also, automation tools kick into action to verify the code’s correction before integration. Software developers implement CI every time they make changes to the codebase. Because of this, your company can discover errors and resolve them faster.

DevOps Pros and Cons

Pros

• Increased productivity
• Upgrades product quality- Rapid product release and prompt delivery to the market
• Reduced software delivery time and transport costs double business profit
• Increases efficiency in processes

Cons

• DevOps experts are challenging to find
• Requires a complete mindset change in IT culture
• Setting up DevOps infrastructure is expensive
• Outsourced DevOps operations pose a business risk to security

DevOps Alternative: DevSecOps

DevSecOps stands for development, security, and operations and integrates security throughout the software development cycle to protect the software’s integrity.

Most organizations consider security at the end of the application development cycle. But DevSecOps wants IT and app teams to understand and incorporate security as a shared responsibility.

Here are some critical DevSecOps aspects to consider:

Security of Tools and Architecture

Security and compliance requirements are integral to the application development lifecycle. This approach ensures servers and computer systems go through security tracking, patching, and vulnerability scanning.

Additionally, DevSecOps automation tools scan all code to detect and rectify vulnerabilities before they go live in production. To help resist automatic rebuilds, virtual machines, and containers receive automated, configured controls.

Accuracy

According to a global CISCO report, 77% of the respondents stated that their present security tools send out security notifications and vulnerabilities that are false positives. These are incorrect alerts that indicate there is malicious activity.

So how can you achieve 100% accuracy? You must conduct security tests to remove false positives and false negatives, which occur when a tool fails to identify a specific threat.

Accurate information can help the relevant IT team diagnose and remedy the problem. And if you want to stop your customers from guessing about their software condition while you work on it, create a user-friendly status page with Instatus.

Security Shifts Left

With DevSecOps, there is a complete change in IT culture in terms of security. It puts security at the forefront by integrating it in the early stages of the creation process.

Security is more than avoiding risks and complying with regulations. Instead, your company must incorporate it in the initial phases to have the maximum impact on app development and delivery.

DevSecOps Pros and Cons

Pros

• Automatically scans code for vulnerabilities
• Vulnerability detection costs are lower
• Development time is shorter
• Quality control improves
• Rapid response to changes and needs
• Low cybersecurity risks for clients

Cons

• Focus on zero-vulnerabilities can slow engineers down as they waste time chasing false positives
• Lack of documented vulnerabilities on early stages can make it hard to detect vulnerabilities
• Engineers and security team need retraining since there’s a change of roles and workflows
• Missed business logic vulnerabilities because of DevSecOps speed\

DevSecOps vs DevOps: Feature Comparison

Final Thoughts

DevOps builds on agile software development and focuses on rapid app development and delivery. It leans heavily on efficient communication and collaboration.

DevSecOps augments DevOps by making security a shared responsibility between software engineers and IT professionals. It emphasizes the interdependence between teams instead of a silo mentality.

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