IT spending is projected to grow by 5.1 percent in 2023. However, with this growth come greater expectations from the market. Customers demand more advanced features and better experiences from the technologies they use. Developers must continuously make improvements to their applications and platforms.

The rapid adoption of DevOps methodologies and cultures has empowered product teams to meet these demands, allowing them to make incremental improvements to their products at shorter intervals using continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) principles. By leveraging automation and orchestration, updates, bug fixes, and new features can go live much faster.

If previously, software updates were released every few months or so, it isn't uncommon for developers these days to push changes into production multiple times daily.

However, given the inherent risks of vulnerabilities in the software lifecycle, developers also need to ensure that their DevOps pipelines are secure. Malicious actors have been performing supply chain attacks against software developers by targeting their DevOps pipelines. These attacks attempt to compromise enterprises through the third-party technologies that developers use.

Supply chain threats are expected to become more rampant. Last year, they grew by a staggering 430 percent.

So what can enterprise teams do to secure their DevOps pipelines moving forward? Here are five key approaches.

1. Streamline the Stack

It isn't uncommon for a development stack to involve dozens of technologies and platforms, and they must all be linked and orchestrated to achieve seamless CI/CD. Each link requires providing a machine or platform access to another.

The problem is that any of these integrations can be misconfigured, creating vulnerabilities. For example, someone might integrate an instance or tool with a weak password or key into the pipeline. If compromised, it can allow hackers to breach the pipeline. Misconfigurations cost enterprises as much as 9 percent of their annual revenue.

To deal with this, developers can streamline their technology stacks. Amazon and Azure are now offering more comprehensive ecosystems and DevOps toolsets. Opting for these minimize the need to integrate various other tools from different vendors to build a capable stack. The probability of misconfigurations goes down with fewer integrations.

2. Manage Secrets Effectively

One of the sources of vulnerabilities in DevOps pipelines is how secrets like keys, certificates, and credentials are managed. Many product engineering teams, for the sake of expediency, hard-code their secrets. Administrator and root accounts, created at the moment of instantiation, are often given permanent access to environments but are left unchecked and unrevoked.

In Kubernetes, for example, you can store secrets in an etcd data store. However, these are not encrypted at rest by default. Further configuration is required to enable encryption. To further boost security, developers can use external vaults to manage secrets.

Secrets management platform Akeyless, for example, uses advanced cryptography to protect secrets stored via its vault. It seamlessly integrates with CI/CD tools to become part of the pipeline's automation and orchestration. It can automatically assign credentials on-demand and perform tasks such as rotating credentials and revoking privileges. This frees enterprise teams from needing to manage secrets manually and risking the exposure of credentials data.

3. Apply the Principle of Least Privilege

It is common for software development teams to scale and grow as projects and products evolve. People can come and go at any point in the development life cycle. The revolving door of IT talent is still expected to continue in 2023.

This does become a security concern in the pipeline, since people have to be provided access to the tasks and resources they will be working on. They have to be issued credentials, which can sometimes even involve the keys and certificates to the apps and machines they have to use or integrate. If there are no set off-boarding policies and procedures in security, these people can even retain access once they leave.

Development teams should apply identity and privilege access management principles to prevent this. They should only provide the necessary privileges for any person or entity to perform their work. This can be done by employing role-based account control (RBAC) to create custom roles and user groups that limit access to specific functions. Credentials can also be set to expire or be revoked at set intervals to prevent long-standing access.

4. Scan Containers, Code and Networks

Unfortunately, rampant vulnerabilities are still a reality for developers moving forward. They can occur anywhere in the entire pipeline, so teams must always look for any issues.

Open-source tools like Docker Bench for Security can scan containers automatically. The tool tests containers against CIS benchmarks to check for any vulnerabilities. Should any issues be found, teams can immediately address them before these vulnerabilities lead to security incidents. Code should also be continuously reviewed and audited using tools like SonarQube. Security issues can be detected and fixed before the code goes live.

Coordination with internal IT administrators should also be considered. Aside from the containers and code, all technology and network layers used for work must be monitored through essential security measures such as firewalls, antimalware, and attack mitigation tools.

5. Create and Communicate Clear Policies

DevOps security should not overlook the role of people in all of this. Humans and the tendency to make mistakes still cause 82 percent of security incidents. It is great that security tools can now be automated, ensuring that routine security tasks are performed. But it can also have a nasty side effect: complacency.

People must be made aware and reminded of their active role in keeping their DevOps pipelines secure. All security policies being implemented by teams should be carefully and clearly worded. Management should ensure that these policies are communicated to and understood by everyone.

Having such policies in place is also part of good corporate governance. Considering that there are now laws and regulations on data privacy, any enterprise would do well having its security policies documented.

Factor Security in All Decisions

The integration of security priorities into DevOps workflows is an encouraging trend. Development teams have to be flexible and adjust to changes that may come their way. Whether these changes are caused by external pressure or internal circumstances, it is critical to note that any change in people and technology can affect the pipeline's security posture.