devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Amol Kulkarni

  • What the Convergence of Observability and Security Means for Devs

    What the Convergence of Observability and Security Means for Devs

    There is a scene in the movie Apollo 13 when the mission control flight director asks why the carbon dioxide scrubber in the command module was a different shape than the one used in the lunar module (and therefore incompatible). The engineer simply replied, “This just isn’t a contingency we’ve even remotely looked at.”

    A similar scenario plays out at many organizations when they examine security and development practices. When it’s time for code to go into production, every developer hopes their code will run as planned–smoothly and error-free. Unfortunately, something will be missed, performance could degrade or new, unanticipated problems can emerge after an application is deployed to production.

    Developers fear the “unknown unknowns.” And it keeps them up at night.

    When an “unknown unknown” problem occurs, it takes time for teams to do the forensics to identify the problem. It can take days or even weeks for teams to complete that initial investigation. If a mission-critical application is offline for a significant period of time due to a forensics investigation, then it can negatively affect your customer’s experience and, ultimately, your organization’s bottom line.

    The “unknown unknowns” problem is another challenge facing developers in today’s unpredictable macro environment. That includes the deluge of data, increasing cyberthreats, an increasingly distributed infrastructure and a remote and hybrid workforce as well as a mix of modern cloud-native and monolithic apps.

    To help developers build for the future and address security concerns, it is imperative they rethink the way they are collecting, operationalizing and storing different types of data from a variety of sources.

    Security and Observability: Better Together

    Today, security and observability have recently begun to overlap, driven by the growing need for organizations to better understand the activity inside their environments. Many forward-thinking organizations are operationalizing the massive amounts of log and event data currently being generated to understand and assess issues in their infrastructure and apps and using these actionable insights to optimize workload, app resource availability, security and uptime.

    So how can developers take advantage of the security and observability convergence trend happening right now?

    Currently, it’s common for developers to have two agents as part of their tech stack. One agent for observability, which is collecting data such as logs and events to get relevant insights into the health and performance of their application in real-time. The other agent is for security to collect data in their devtest, integration and production environments.

    Since these two agents often collect the same data, there is an opportunity to consolidate it into a single location, such as a unified security platform with a single agent, where this data can be overlaid with time series analytics to deliver relevant insights to users. Using this approach of having both security and non-security data in one place will significantly speed up the process of getting these valuable insights into the developer’s hands.

    In addition to getting insights faster, another benefit of having this data in a single location is the ability to access historical data. Giving developers the ability to store and manage data for long periods of time allows them to get insights from this historical data, so they can better understand alerts, incidents and adversaries. This can help them correlate in terms of understanding the risk to an application, such as potential “unknown unknown” threats, which they can proactively address before it causes any damage.

    Adopting a converged security and observability approach is the most mature step that organizations can take to help developers deliver the best outcomes and best experiences for their customers and users. As more organizations rely on the cloud and the speed of business rapidly increases, developers must transform their view of the health, performance and security of applications and infrastructure. Giving developers this perspective will dramatically help them take rapid action against an adverse event before it impacts their company’s bottom line.

  • Why DevSecOps Should Be Top Priority

    Why DevSecOps Should Be Top Priority

    DevOps culture and process are integral to maintaining the pace of cloud-native software development for organizations, especially when code deployments might take place many times a day. The ability to instantly create, populate and scale cloud applications and infrastructure, often automated through code, allows enormous agility and incredible speed. But moving this quickly means security is often left in the dust.

    The reality is many organizations still haven’t come to grips with how to properly secure the cloud. A lack of cloud security experience, coupled with legacy security policies that don’t encompass the cloud and a shortage of cybersecurity expertise relevant to cloud environments, presents a challenge. And cybercriminals are moving quickly to exploit these gaps: a 2021 report showed that almost half of the more than 2,500 disclosed cloud-related vulnerabilities recorded were disclosed in the last 18 months. 

    Due to the agile nature of cloud technologies, security must be integrated at every stage of the DevOps life cycle—also known as DevSecOps. A DevSecOps mindset is an absolute necessity for any organization that is leveraging the cloud, and requires new security guidelines, policies, practices and tools.

    The Cloud is Vulnerable

    Data breaches are among the most urgent concerns of any organization today. A 2021 report revealed that data breach costs rose from $3.86 million USD in 2020 to $4.24 million USD in 2021. The techniques that adversaries used to infiltrate the cloud differ from on-premises environments. Malware attacks are far less prevalent; instead, attackers exploit misconfigurations and other vulnerabilities.

    Another major concern is that organizations are usually using multi-cloud, which can cause a visibility issue. It can result in cloud workloads and traffic that are not properly monitored, leaving security gaps to be exploited by attackers. Also, DevOps teams tend to provide employees with far more privileges and permissions than needed to perform their job, which increases identity-based threats. According to research, nearly 80% of cyberattacks leveraged identity-based attacks to compromise legitimate credentials. 

    Threat actors will also deploy a variety of attack methods to compromise an organization’s cloud environment. Lateral movement is a common technique that involves threat actors going from the point of entry to the rest of the network (for example, infiltrating an end user or system hosted on-premises and then shifting their access to the cloud). Research showed that adversaries move quickly—in just 98 minutes they can move laterally from a compromised instance to another instance within the victim environment. 

    Alternatively, another way for attackers to profit from cloud vulnerabilities is by installing cryptominers onto a company’s system. Cryptocurrency mining is an activity that requires large amounts of computing power. Threat actors will use compromised cloud accounts to carry out this process and extract as much profit as possible, while simultaneously using up the company’s resources. 

    Shifting Security Left

    Protecting the cloud means securing an increasingly large attack surface that ranges from cloud workloads to virtual servers and other technologies that underpin the cloud environment. Attackers are always looking for soft spots they can exploit, particularly vulnerable cloud applications. With organizations moving to the cloud now more than ever to meet the needs of a remote workforce, opportunities to exploit cloud apps have increased. 

    Traditionally, code is subjected to security as the last phase before release. When vulnerabilities are exposed, either the release is delayed or the development team has to scramble to correct each security issue while the security team has to scramble to check the revisions. For DevOps teams, shifting security left ensures vulnerable code is identified as it is developed rather than in the testing phase, which reduces costs and results in secure cloud apps.

    The concept of shift left security is an essential part of the software development life cycle, and getting it right must be a top priority. By embedding security into the earliest phases of the development process, organizations can achieve DevSecOps and significantly reduce the security concerns around cloud-native software and application development. 

    Effective Cloud Security can Enable DevSecOps 

    Organizations that use DevSecOps tools and practices can build a powerful and secure cloud foundation. Unifying the visibility of multi-cloud environments and continuous intelligent monitoring of all cloud resources are essential in cloud security. That unified visibility must be able to detect misconfigurations, vulnerabilities and security threats while providing actionable insights and automated remediation for developers and DevOps teams. 

    Additionally, it’s essential to have the right security policies in place that enforce cloud security standards to meet (or exceed) industry and government regulations across the entire infrastructure. This includes everything from multi-factor authentication to general security best practices for all employees and robust incident response that ensures the company is prepared for an attack.

    However, the core of any effective cloud security strategy should always be up-to-date threat intelligence. Adversaries are constantly finding new ways to target the cloud and search for any weaknesses they can exploit. Having the latest data about threat actors and their tactics, and then applying it to breach detection is an absolute must. Threat intelligence enables security teams to anticipate threats and prioritize defense, mitigation and remediation effectively to preempt them. Delivering all this functionality from the cloud and for the cloud through DevSecOps provides organizations with the prevention, detection, visibility and response capabilities they need to beat attackers.