DevOps – the rapid development and deployment of an organization’s applications and services – plays an integral part in the overall security of critical data. Every change put forth by DevOps teams changes the threat landscape, potentially opening systems up to new threats or vulnerabilities.
In a recent survey, DevOps professionals noted that their top four security challenges were:
- Lack of automated, integrated security testing tools (61%),
- Inconsistent approach to DevOps security (56%),
- Disruption to production from security testing (48%), and
- False positives (46%)
Threat modeling software can help DevOps to address these challenges in a standardized, process-oriented way.
4 Ways Threat Modeling Solves Top DevOps Security Challenges
1. Automated & Integrated Security Testing Tools
Implementing a threat modeling software solution creates the opportunity to adopt automated tools, such as automatic scanning and threat identification, alerts, classification, and reports. Companies can enjoy the benefits of a threat modeling solution without the administrative burden of a cumbersome, difficult-to-manage process.
2. Consistent Approach
Over half of the DevOps teams surveyed said that an inconsistent approach to DevOps security was one of the most significant challenges that they faced. A major benefit of enterprise threat modeling software to DevOps is that it provides a consistent, standardized approach to analyzing the threat landscape, even in a CI/CD environment.
3. Reduced Disruption
An informal security testing process contains the inherent risk that a critical threat may be overlooked, but developers fear that incorporating DevOps security practices may slow down the software development process. On the other hand, the needed time and monetary costs of retroactively revising problems in coding and addressing attack surface vulnerabilities after releasing an application can far outweigh the time needed to implement DevOps security in the SDLC.
Without a consistent, standardized, and automated system, security testing can create a bottleneck that prevents the rapid development and deployment of new applications and services. By implementing an automated threat modeling tool, every stage of the SDLC can be monitored for security threats and reduce disruption to the software development process.
4. False Positives
False positives – mistakenly flagging an error that isn’t actually an error – can further delay the DevOps cycle. Once an error is flagged it must be investigated and addressed, and applications and services are put on hold while this occurs.
Threat modeling software can help reduce the prevalence of false positives by removing human error from the initial evaluation with automated threat scanning and identification. Further, many false positives are generated by static code analysis, which takes place at a specific point during the development phase. Threat modeling software functions as a part of the CI/CD environment, supporting continuous, dynamic evaluation and re-evaluation of the threat landscape.
As automation improves efficiencies throughout the DevOps cycle, it becomes less likely that addressing potential threats will create a bottleneck in the cycle.
Threat modeling can help a DevOps team to meet the challenges of creating and maintaining DevOps security in complex technology environments. It offers automated, integrated security testing tools and provides a consistent, standardized approach to security testing throughout the DevOps cycle, reducing the disruption of an erratic, ad-hoc approach.
About ThreatModeler
ThreatModeler is an automated threat modeling tool that strengthens an enterprise’s SDLC by identifying, predicting and defining threats across all applications and devices in the operational IT stack. This automated platform works with all types of computing environments.
To learn more about how ThreatModeler™ can help your organization build a scalable threat modeling process, book a demo to speak to a ThreatModeler expert today.