SUCCESS STORIES / IT Agility

Step up your DevOps journey with Shift Security Left

How an Irish service provider adopted DevSecOps to enable elite security measures, address application vulnerabilities, and fast-track product releases.

Background

With technological development, the threat landscape has changed in recent years, and cyberattacks, specifically in the communications industry, have increased. Since this industry controls a significant chunk of the complex and critical infrastructure, an attack’s impact is significant and intense.

Cybersecurity Ventures says that over 60% of businesses are experiencing breaches and rising cyber-attacks. The monetary damage caused by cybercrime is scaling $6 trillion worldwide, and this cost is expected to increase by 15% every year over the next half-decade.

DevOps is witnessing a faster adoption as organizations run rapid and frequent software development lifecycles. However, pushing security to the bottom of priorities has paved the way for malicious attacks and phishing scams.

How can organizations incorporate security in their DevOps cycles?

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Client Situation

Our client is the most prominent digital cable television service provider in Ireland. The company adopted DevOps to integrate and streamline its development and operations process.

During the second phase of the operation, the company decided to integrate security processes and the associated tools into the software development lifecycle to tackle the evolving threat landscape.

The intent was to detect and fix security issues early in the development cycle to prevent delays in application release timelines and save costs.

Prodapt’s DevSecOps pipeline fortified software development for the service provider and accelerated its secure product release timeline.

Diagnosis

The client had tried to shorten the release cycles by adopting DevOps. However, in the absence of robust vulnerability management, there was a threat of infiltration and loss of important data. To prevent cyber-attacks, the client needed to integrate security early and into every aspect of the SDLC.

Adopting Kubernetes empowered the client to embrace cloud-hosted applications and achieve carrier-grade network and performance. However, they needed to address their immature containers, which lacked operational best practices. Besides, there were concerns over system complexity and security, which were susceptible to cyber-attacks.

They had no real-time visibility to continuously monitor, identify, and detect security issues in containerized environments and orchestration platforms.

Solving It

As the vulnerability of applications was a critical issue, Prodapt took a strategic approach to implement DevSecOps.

Our Shift Left approach enabled a continuous focus on security in agile software development. This ensured the security of code and applications as they were built. It facilitated identifying and resolving defects early in the software development lifecycle, improving code quality and reducing costs.

We strengthened the Kubernetes cluster to examine potential threats and used open-source tools to run CIS benchmark tests to secure code. By implementing tools for object analysis recommendations, we improved reliability and security. In addition, we automated the threat discovery process to scan and analyze container images and identify vulnerabilities.

The following approach was Shift Right, where we leveraged a threat detection engine for continuous security monitoring to combat vulnerabilities. This could detect unexpected behavior, configuration changes, intrusions, and data theft in real-time.

Our team set up a centralized vulnerability management dashboard to manage the entire threat landscape in one place, integrated with the existing monitoring and observability framework. With real-time tracking and security orchestration, the dashboard allows teams to address threat incidents and undertake remedial action proactively.

The DevSecOps pipeline enabled the company to make its software development cycle fit to detect threats early and accelerate its product release timelines.

The client achieved an 80% reduction in vulnerabilities and a 70% reduction in security incidents. This led the company to slash OpEx costs and execute secure product releases 2X faster.

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