Shifting security left during the software development process can be tough for companies because of the sheer number of operational things that go along with implementing security that must occur somehow in the realm of DevOps. It can be easy to lose control over their security processes without some sort of guardrails in place to help.

A brand new company is helping do just that. I’m excited to introduce disrupt:Ops, which bills itself as a guardrails platform to help companies include and enforce best practices across security and operations, bringing security into the DevOps process at the beginning. My friend Mike Rothman, disrupt:Ops co-founder and president, joins me in this DevOps Chat to discuss the vision of his company and how it hopes to help make security truly a part of DevOps.

You can read more about disrupt:Ops and their guardrail approach to cloud security and devsecops from another co-founder of the company, my friend Rich Mogull at https://devopsy.kinsta.cloud/building-great-cloud-security-guardrails

As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

Audio

Transcript

Alan Shimel: Hey everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. Breaking some big news today on DevOps Chat, the launch of a labor of love of some friends of mine. I’m happy to be joined by Mike Rothman, cofounder and president of disrupt:Ops. Mike, welcome.

Mike Rothman: Alan, it’s great to be here, thanks. It’s always fun to catch up with old friends.

Shimel: Yep, and old friends it is, Mike. We should let our audience know – maybe we shouldn’t let them know. But we are old friends. We go back a long time now, back to the beginning of blogging and security –

Rothman: That’s right.

Shimel: It’s got to be 2004, 2003 or something like that.

Rothman: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. When I had dark hair. Actually I didn’t have dark hair back then, but you know, it’s –

Shimel: I had hair.

Rothman: You had hair. That’s right.

Shimel: I had hair. But you know what, Mike? I said it was a labor of love and everything else. Just in the way of background, why don’t you share with our audience your personal sort of journey in tech and, you know, work history.

Rothman: Well sure. I started out, God, in what feels like 100 years ago, as a mainframe programmer. Ended up doing some local area networking stuff. Kind of found my way to network security. Went into research for quite a while. Did a couple of companies and then went back to research and for the last 10 or 11 years at this point I’ve been partnered up with Rich Mogull and Adrian Lane at Securosis, doing a bunch of kind of information, security-centric research. And actually about a year and a half ago we spun out some technology that we had prototyped within Securosis in cloud management and cloud automation into our new company disrupt:Ops, and have been just making a lot of progress over the last year with that. And that’s what we’re announcing this week.

Shimel: Yep. So Mike, you’re being humble. When you say you did research, you were an analyst at Giga, were you not?

Rothman: META Group, yes. META Group, exactly.

Shimel: META Group. And then you were also – you had executive positions in several cyber – we didn’t call it cyber – infosec companies back then. 

Rothman: It was. Yeah, you bet. So companies like TrueSecure and CypherTrust, you know, back early in the e-mail security days. I did a network monitoring company called EIQ. So yeah, I’ve been there, done that. Have the road rash and kind of the screw-ups under my belt to prove it. But you know, it’s interesting in terms of just how long and how small an industry security is for being actually a really big thing nowadays. 

Shimel: Being so big, yeah. It really is. And Mike, again, for many people in our audience who come from DevOps or even from security – but they’re worldwide and they not be familiar with Securosis. You know, Rich Mogull comes over from Gartner. Adrian’s been CTO at major companies. You know, you guys are probably the leading, let’s call it independent security analyst research firm – you said 10 years-plus. Certainly in my time you guys laid the fundamental kind of – a lot of the fundamental backbone of what Cloud Security Alliance teaches and so forth. 

Rothman: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So it was interesting. So I guess it was probably eight and a half years ago we partnered up with the Cloud Security Alliance and helped them build their curriculum for their CCSK certification. And that got us to be much deeper than your typical analyst in terms of having to play around with cloud, having to understand automation, having to build a number of the kind of scripts and – I’ll call it the inherent messiness of building out a stack in the cloud and really making it operational, because we were eating our own dog food. Our website, a lot of the stuff that we had prototyped was really demonstrative of the challenges that organizations face as they move a bunch of their stuff into the cloud, and really as they embrace a DevOps mindset of trying to be agile, trying to be innovative, trying to move towards more of a continuous type of deployment model. We really came across a number of the challenges these organizations have in terms of just really maintaining control, right? Once you have multiple DevOps teams doing things in multiple kind of accounts, you start to run into challenges relative to how you enforce best practices.

And that’s really one of the challenges that security people have with this whole DevOps revolution, which is, “Hey, this sounds great, but we’ve got a playbook, a set of practices and policies that we really require all of our environments to adhere to in order to protect that data.” And obviously the faster you move, the more agile and continuous you try to operate, the harder it is to enforce those best practices.

Shimel: More about that in a second. You touched on two things there that we’re going to dig into. Let me just finish laying my groundwork. Mike, besides you, Rich and Adrian, the Securosis gang, there are at least two other key people on the founding team of disrupt:Ops who also happen to be friends of ours for years –

Rothman: Yeah, that’s right.

Shimel: Give them their due. Why don’t you give them a shout out?

Rothman: You bet. So back when we spun the technology out of Securosis, we brought on two guys, very experienced guys in the security space. Our CEO is Jody Brazil. So Jody was a cofounder and long-time CEO of a company called FireMon, which I know you’ve done work with for a long time –

Shimel: Sure.

Rothman: So Jody kind of is really the driving force behind a lot of what we’re doing at disrupt:Ops. And our CTO is a guy named Brandy Peterson, another longtime security professional. He was actually the CTO of FishNet Security for 15 or 16 years.

Shimel: As was Jody before Brandy, right?

Rothman: Yeah. I met both of them around the same time.

Shimel: Yes, when I first met Jody, he was CTO and FishNet, and he said, “Who is this Jewish guy with the New York accent?” I went out to visit him in Kansas City to tell him why you shouldn’t use Qualys, and he should use StillSecure, and he made fun of my accent. [Laughs]. Good times. Anyway. But Mike, let’s turn back to a couple of things you were saying about kind of the genesis driving disrupt:Ops. You touched on one thing; you said, “multiple DevOps teams.” So this is something we see, and I call it almost second-generation DevOps. You know, when a company or an organization is first embarking on their DevOps journey and they do sort of a trail balloon, and they pick a project and they have a DevOps team – you know, and they may not call it DevOps. They  have a team that’s practicing DevOps sort of principles on this one particular project. And oftentimes, wow, great success, because you are – you know, it’s an isolated environment, right? In some ways you’re not in the quote/unquote real world.

And then you say, “This is great. Let’s take it out. Let’s expand that beachhead. Let’s expand the bubble.” And all of a sudden – you know, larger organizations; small teams or smaller organizations not so much, but larger organizations – now you start having two, three, four, six different projects that are being run with a DevOps mindset and you have multiple instances of Jenkins and you have three different – this team’s using Puppet; that one’s using Chef. And serverless. And all of the complexities that we see in today’s modern software factory. And it’s chaos, right? And then at some point the CIO or VP or director of IT says, “Oh my God, this DevOps thing isn’t working so good. It’s all over the place.” Let alone the security guy’s screaming, you know, right out of the Phoenix Project, “No, no, no!”

Rothman: That’s right.

Shimel: And that’s a problem that we see with a lot of second-gen, if you will, DevOps installs, where it goes beyond the initial team to several teams.

Rothman: That’s right.

Shimel: That’s what you guys see.

Rothman: We do. And it’s interesting, because what you have are really kind of two paths at that point, in terms of how these teams start to behave when starting to be put under scrutiny in terms of, kind of again, their ability to enforce operational and security best practices. You know, one group kind of buries their head in the sand and continues to move forward and really don’t do much, right? They’re like, “Oh, it’s okay,” and you know, they’ll maybe run a vulnerability scan to kind of prove that they’re sort of within policy, but they really don’t have an operational environment that is built to work in concert with the rest of their factory. I love that term, right? That really does encompass a lot of how software is being built today. And then the other part ends up being folks starting to build their own scripts, right? They take maybe an open source-looking thing, they start to build a bunch of their own scripts and code around it, and then what they find is they’ve got a suitcase full of these scripts that they end up having to maintain, upgrade. They don’t have any means of reporting or any scheduling for how they enforce and run a lot of these scripts.

It’s really – you know, we call it automation, but it’s manual automation, which I get is a total oxymoron. But that’s really how it is. You know, you have a bunch of folks, they’re building these scripts out, they’re executing them manually or through very simple triggers, without any means of maintaining, upgrading or scheduling or reporting on what these really key aspects of their operational environment are doing. And it becomes, again, a big problem, where you have – it’s unwieldy because of just the sheer number of things that are happening in a modern DevOps environment with multiple teams. Then you compound it with a number of very tactical scripts that are built to surround the environment, if you’re doing anything. And then at some point somebody says, “Hold on a sec, folks. This is just not where we want to be. We really need to think about it more from an operational excellence perspective and make sure we’ve got an environment that we can enforce our best practices for security and operations.”

And that’s kind of when they get the sense that, “Well, I’m either going to have to make a significant investment in this and become like” – Rich calls them the unicorns of cloud land, right? You know, the Netflix and the Capital One and, you know, the folks who have whole teams of environments that are building tools to do this. Or they have to start looking for some kind of commercial option, because there really is no option, but you’ve got to do something. You can build it yourself or you can look to buy it. And candidly, until the last handful of months, there really wasn’t a realistic commercial offering to start implementing some of these capabilities.

Shimel: No, no. I think the bigger – you know, a lot of what you’re saying certainly obviously rings true. The other fundamental piece of this is, even if you are using one of these homegrown, cockamamie, you know Rube Goldberg kind of things –

Rothman: Yeah.

Shimel: – is it the security guys who are? You know what? Shame on me. It’s not the guys. Is it the security team who’s doing this, people? Is it the DevOps cross-functional team? Is it a little bit of both?

Rothman: Yeah, yeah.

Shimel: You know, how many of – look, here’s my basic, fundamental belief. You are not going to find a developer who raises his hand who says, “I want to write shitty code. I can’t wait to put something insecure out there.” No one says that. No one says that, right? They’ll tell you they’ve got time pressure, there’s pressure to release, pressure to release, they wish they could do more on security. And some of them, the enlightened ones, as you said, they’ll even try. They’ll run a vulnerability scan, because there are certainly open source kind of tools out there for them to mess with.

The problem is, they go to a lot of the security guys, and as you alluded to before, security guys say, “Well we have our rules and procedures here. This is a no.” Right? And they don’t want to hear no. They’ve got to go.

Rothman: You know, what’s interesting, Alan – I want to hit on a couple things that you alluded to there, because they’re important, right? The first is kind of where you start to see the agitation for better operational and security practices. And it’s not that it’s not the security folks. Obviously they’re always going to push for that. But it really is – you mentioned it, right? The DevOps teams that we’ve worked with, they’re very cognizant, they’re very serious stewards of kind of the corporate data, and they want to do the right thing. But in a lot of cases they don’t know what to do, right? So you have a whole bunch of folks who don’t know what they don’t know and they don’t want to go to the internal security team because of a lot of those things you were just alluding to. They’d say, “No, we can’t do that. We have all of these rules.” And in a lot of cases the security team has not updated their set of conditions, their set of policies – 

Shimel: Exactly.

Rothman: – to work in a DevOps type of environment, so these folks really struggle. They talk to – again, on the consulting side of our house at disrupt:Ops, we do a lot of work with those teams in terms of helping them understand what cloud native architecture looks like and how to integrate cloud security into their environment, and really just to help them build a program in order to do that. So then you do that with one DevOps team, then you end up talking to another DevOps team and maybe the third DevOps team, and finally IT, at some point, they’re like, “Um, what are you telling our folks? They seem to like what you’re doing and they seem to be doing things in a more secure way. So can you help us?” And then IT starts to get religion. The security team starts to get a little bit of religion about what they have to evolve to. And it really is kind of that interesting transition where it has started kind of out in the DevOps community with, again, those enlightened ones going, “I don’t know what I don’t know. Let me get some help,” and then it kind of back-ending into security. That’s not always the case, but probably three quarters of the time, that tends to be the transition that we see.

And the other thing I want to hit is just about velocity, right? JA very forward-thinking DevOps leader that we’re working with, he said it the best. And he’s just like, “I’ve got 20 DevOps teams. I cannot slow these people down. They are doing stuff; they are making progress. The last thing I can do is put a bunch of onerous security requirements on what it is that they’re doing. They’ll ignore me, they’ll go around me and that’s counterproductive. I can’t do that. What I really need is to be able to build and enforce a set of guardrails around their environment.” Right? That term, “guardrails?” It just really kind of opened up and was a light bulb in our head when we were having this conversation. It’s not about stopping them from doing things. If anything, it’s about allowing them to go faster, yet making sure they don’t drive the car off the road, right?

And that’s really the metaphor that resonates relative to what we’re doing at D:Ops, and really just kind of where the environment is going, in that we have to be able to move faster. Slowing things down is not an option, yet you want to make sure that you are not putting corporate data at risk. You are not opening up significant new attack services just – because people are moving so quickly. Sometimes they make mistakes. Sometimes automation isn’t done in the perfect way. Sometimes humans get involved and certainly are fallible from that standpoint. But with a lot of the inherent, underlying automation orchestration that’s possible within the cloud and DevOps and continuous, you have options to enforce these best practices in a way that we couldn’t do in our traditional data center with our traditional waterfall types of development and operational motions.

Shimel: Absolutely. And you know, Mike – I mean, I’ve spoken about this a lot at various conferences and stuff. A lot of that has to do – you know, we use this term “shift left” in security and all that. A lot of it does have to do with getting to security earlier, faster. Yeah, we’re going to have to automate it. Yes, we can’t be the roadblock. But we can be the appendix after – when I say, “we,” I mean security. We can be the appendix after the delivery or after the deployment.

Rothman: I’ll raise you. I see your point and I’ll raise you one, right? I’m of the opinion that security isn’t a thing. Right? Security should be within everything.

Shimel: Yeah.

Rothman: And that’s really the mentality that we’ve been trying to push on the industry for a long time.

Shimel: Amen.

Rothman: And it’s one of these things where we really can’t afford to wait and be in a position where we’re trying to retrofit poorly architected systems that are moving faster than we’ve ever seen before and then say, “Oh hey, we’ve got to change it because of security,” or because of any other operational gap that we see there. Right? What we have to do is be building in a way that allows us to use architecture as security control, right? Isolation, segregation, multi-factor authentical, identity management – all of these things that are fundamental building-blocks of what we do in the cloud and DevOps can be utilized to build in a much more secure fashion. And it’s really about those kinds of practices that are going to make the biggest difference relative to what it is that we see and what it is that we deploy over the next couple of years.

Again, like I said, I don’t think security is a thing five to seven years from now. Because if it’s not embedded within everything that we deploy, we screwed up.

Shimel: Yep. You know, I heard – because I never come up with original ideas. I just listen. But I heard something awhile back – “Security needs to become synonymous with quality.” And we’ve had QA as a concept in software technology forever or for a long time. Security needs to be just built in, like as part of the quality control. Right? The same way shit or stuff gets tested, whether it be hardware or software or whatever. Security needs to be part of that quality. 

Rothman: You bet. To use a software term? Right? Why is a functionality defect different than a security defect?

Shimel: Exactly.

Rothman: Right? And they should all be within the same thing. And again, that’s a lot of when you start talking about immutable, when you start talking about kind of building security testing into your pipeline, which again, is stuff I know that you guys at devopsy.kinsta.cloud write about quite a bit. Again, it’s really not any different than you managing and making sure that you hit your functionality kind of specs from the standpoint of just building code, right? Part of that factory. So yeah, the code has to work, but it also can and should be secure, and there really aren’t different operational motions to make that happen. And that’s what’s so exciting. For a guy who spent 25 years trying to retrofit and get people to think about security as part of their core structure and to treat it as really a business function, it’s really enlightening to be in a situation where you actually can implement a lot of those functions within the core processes that you use to develop the technology.

And again, are we there yet? Of course not. Is there a lot of education to be done? Without a doubt. But we at least have the option now, right? That’s the aspirational goal to what it is that we all do every day, which is to make sure that we’re pushing for the right types of decisions to be made as early in the process as we can, because we all know how much it costs to fix it later.

Shimel: Absolutely. Mike, I’ve got to tell you, listening to this conversation, I’m thrown back to, “NAC: is it a feature or stand-alone?”

Rothman: You’re dating both of us, man. Stop that out. Cut that out.

Shimel: It’s such a pleasure to talk a little theory here with you. But let’s turn for a second to real stuff. Not that what we’re talking about isn’t real. But I wanted to give our audience a little bit of a taste – so disrupt:Ops – great people, great big problem to tackle out there. Give us some specifics. What are you guys doing?

Rothman: Yeah, so what we’re doing is we’re basically building a cloud management platform to implement a lot of these ideas that we’ve been talking about for the last couple of minutes, Alan. Initially it’s a guardrails platform. So what we have is the ability to, in an AWS environment, enforce a set of best practices across security, operational and also cost management. So one of those things we don’t talk about too much is that developers don’t really like to shut their stuff down because, “No, it’s going to mess with something. I don’t have to. The CFO bitches but we don’t really care.” What we can do is also implement best practices in order for folks to clean up their room, right? We try to do that with our kids all of the time, too. You know, so we try to do that with our developers as well.

So really implementing a platform for security, operational and cost management guardrails, to again, immediately not just find the issues – there are a lot of tools, as you said. A lot of vulnerability scanners can kind of look at your cloud environment and tell you you have problems. The issue with that is that most operations people are overwhelmed with the number of other things they have to fix every day. Adding more stuff to their list doesn’t really help them. So disrupt:Ops is really focused not just on finding the issues, but also fixing them and enforcing those best practices. Let me give you an example of that. So let’s just say some person decides they want to open up a server to the internet because it’s just easier for them to do that. Well obviously that would be a pretty significant security problem. So as opposed to just taking that server offline, what you can do is you can basically change the security group to make sure that it’s only accessible via a known, good IP address range within your corporation. That’s a good example of a guardrail. Or making sure that you’ve got MFA turned on for every account that gets spun up by your magical Terraform environment that may not build that out as a core security requirement.

So again, there are 50 to 60 of these guardrails, in effect, that you can implement in your environment, to again, make sure that you are not just alerting when you get out of policy, but actually fixing the issues, in a lot of cases before you even know they’re issues, so that you’re not sitting there trying to pick up the pieces after half of your data is in Chechnya.

Shimel: Exactly. Or Romania.

Rothman: Or Romania. It’s somewhere.

Shimel: Mike, how is the offering packaged? Is it a SaaS kind of offering? 

Rothman: Yeah, it is. What we found is since – you know, remember the days where people were like, “Oh, I don’t know about this cloud thing or SaaS. I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that”? Now it’s like, “Wait, you want me to install software in my environment? What? What’s wrong with you?”

Shimel: That would be kind of oxymoronic for a DevOps tool, but –

Rothman: That’s right. That’s right. So we deliver as a SaaS service. It’s actually a very cool kind of one-click provisioning process where, when you’re logged into your AWS account, you run basically a cloud formation script that really kind of gives us cross-account privileges to your environment. And again, we’re security guys, right? So at the end of the day, we are basically not even just assuming but enforcing least privilege. So we only have read-only access. When we need to make changes, we grant the privilege as we need it, then we revoke it. Because again, what we’re trying to do is make sure we enforce operational best practices; not add more attack service. So again, we’ve built the environment to be secure by design. We use all of our own dog food, to make sure that we are adhering to kind of common best practices. And again, we’re all 25-plus years security folks, so we do take that pretty seriously.

Shimel: Excellent. Mike, for people who maybe want to download – not download, excuse me – sign up for it or check it out more, where can they get more information?

Rothman: Yeah, disruptops.com. So by the time you hear this little interview, the site will be live. There’s a place you can sign up. You know, first we start with a demo and show you what it’s about and then you can sign up for early access. And again, we’re kind of expanding towards the end of this month, in October. We’re going to add a bunch more folks to the system with the goal of kind of being ready to actually sell the product by the end of the year.

Shimel: Fantastic, man. Well, I don’t have to tell you, Mike. I wish you, Rich, Adrian, Jody, Brandy and the rest of the team nothing but success. We’ll be checking in, I have a feeling, pretty often here, whether it be through Security Boulevard, devopsy.kinsta.cloud, Container Journal or what have you. And you know, fantastic. It’s good to have you back in the game.

Rothman: Yeah, no, I’m excited. Again, really it’s not just a big promise and not just a huge opportunity. You know, and what Rich, Adrian and I, and now Jody and Brandy have always done is – you know, we’re trying to do the right thing to evolve the practice. Right? And that’s what it’s about. It’s a big world and there’s a lot of opportunity. There’ll be a lot of folks talking about guardrails over the next year. And that’s great, right? Because what we want to do is get to a position where we can move faster but move more securely, and I a lot of cases, in the world that we grew up in, those were counter indicators. Right? You couldn’t move fast and be secure. You couldn’t do operational excellence and make sure that you’ve got a lot of these things enforced. And now you can, and that’s what’s really exciting to us. Again, we’re just excited to partner with you, as always, and again, just go out and solve some bring problems for a lot of organizations.

Shimel: Fantastic. All right. Mike Rothman, president and co-founder of disrupt:Ops, a hot new entrant in the DevSecOps space, with a great pedigree and a real reason for being our guest today on DevOps Chat. I hope you’ve enjoyed this. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Until next time, everyone, have a great day. Bye-bye.

— Alan Shimel