DevSecOps Adoption in BFSI: It can keep You Out of Trouble

DevSecops adoption – Whether it’s for shopping, banking, vehicles, education, travel, or health, digital innovation has revolutionized how everyone interacts. Furthermore, the pandemic has had a significant impact on our lives and has intensified the demand to adopt a digital lifestyle. This pandemic had an impact not only on our personal lives, but also on our social behavior and finances, how we do business, open accounts, onboard new employees, pay bills, and even how our favorite sports team are performing. The same effect is being felt in global economy and business. In order to remain competitive and flexible, businesses have learnt to adopt digital revolution over time, but the pandemic generated a need to implement digital channels swiftly. Many businesses now have to decide whether to change or perish. While businesses are embracing the digital revolution, there are security risks and data protection concerns that come with it.

The BFSI sector

The BFSI sector is leading this transition and working to reinvent how businesses conduct themselves online. It is not that focus on Digital has just kicked off after Covid19 pandemic, even long before Covid-19, Companies in the BFSI sector were leading a range of digital transformation initiatives. Although these digital initiatives are required to stay competitive, they also have downsides. By leveraging modern application design and delivery models, organizations can navigate cloud migrations effectively. However, neglecting gaps may endanger digital service security and reliability.

Nearly three-quarters of IT leaders in the APAC region think pandemic has increased the threat to their services and prompted them to accelerate their data security plans in tandem with digital services, according to a recent study. CIOs want to implement a digital transition that is sustainable without compromising security, building a robust regulatory environment and rigorous security standards is the goal in order to adhere to them at every stage of the development lifecycle. For the majority of these concerns, DevSecOps adoption appears to be the silver bullet.

DevSecOps: What Is It?

In many ways, the previous global recession gave birth to DevOps. In 2009, when the economy was in free fall, businesses sought to boost productivity through increased automation and agility. This shifted their focus from Capex to Opex. At the same time, the agile infrastructure movement was exploding, which sparked a rapid and unceasing surge in cloud usage. In order to enhance communication between development and operations as well as other IT stakeholders like architecture and information security, DevOps placed a strong emphasis on people and culture.

Similar to this, severe economic disruption brought on by the current pandemic have accelerated the transition to DevSecOps—the next stage of agile computing that integrates security automation into the development life cycle. To introduce security procedures earlier in the cycle rather than delaying them till the end. DevSecOps introduces the idea of security early in the lifecycle of application development, making it possible to identify risks and vulnerabilities before they have an impact on the quality or delivery of the program that is currently being developed.

The integration of security controls into development and operations’ daily tasks would make security everyone’s responsibility.

However, for IT teams, the critical components to focus on include code analysis, change management, compliance monitoring, threat investigation, vulnerability assessment, security training, and others. Through this adoption, security features like firewalling, vulnerability scanning, and identity and access management (IAM) might be activated programmatically throughout the DevOps lifecycle, enabling security teams to establish policies.

Verified Market Research report estimates that the Global DevSecOps Market will grow at a CAGR of 30.76% from 2022 to 2027, from a value of USD 3.73 billion in 2021 to USD 41.66 billion by 2030. In the DevSecOps market, BFSI has the largest market share.

According to recent Progress whitepaper published on DevSecOps adoption,

• 17% of organizations still considered themselves at an exploratory and proof-of-concept stage in respect to DevSecOps
• 86% experienced challenges in their current approaches to security
• 51% admitted that they didn’t fully understand how security fits into DevSecOps
• 71% agreed that culture was the biggest barrier to DevSecOps progress
• 73% of respondents admit more could be done to improve DevSecOps practices
• Only 30% feel confident in the level of collaboration between security and development
• Only 16% are prioritizing culture as an area to optimize in the next 12-18 months.

What does this actually mean?

Part of the solution is to figure out how to combine security and development so that everyone involved may participate throughout the development lifecycle. In order to create “Security As a Code,” this should be based on ongoing, flexible collaboration between all parties involved, from architects to site reliability engineers to security operations teams. Security analysts should also regularly receive data flows at an advanced level to allow them to analyze security threats in all data flows.

Because not understanding what’s in your data can put your consumers or your company at serious risk for security, audit, and compliance, as well as serious financial penalties if your data practices breach GDPR, PDP, or any other emerging privacy rule. Teams can prioritize threats, address issues, prevent problems, and recover faster by integrating all of this data and information into contextual and actionable insights for security.

DevSecOps adoption in the BFSI sector

According to Deloitte and the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), financial institutions were allocating 6% to 14% of their information technology budgets to cybersecurity, which has climbed two to three times during this pandemic. They also spend about 3X as much as non-financial firms, according to Kaspersky data. With such a significant commitment, these firms penalized with serious implications if errors are made or client data is compromised.

Therefore, the IT departments have to make sure that their digital commitments are met without jeopardizing security and compliance standards. IT teams are faced with the challenge of managing the digital expansion centered on the ever-growing data, turning that data into insights for internal services, and maintaining the security of this approach over time. Furthermore, these approaches are challenging to develop and implement with legacy infrastructure and systems.

We can sum up the flow by taking a look at these significant financial services trends:

• Financial institutions are embracing the cloud to revolutionize how they engage with customers through more app and infrastructure-as-code development.
• At this rate, code bases are progressively being shifted to third-party open-source libraries, which introduces additional risk and security concerns.
• Financial institutions are still a top target for cyberattacks.
• Even with the funding at hand, there remains a lack of qualified security personnel.
• The key point is that security cannot be compromised, and growth of digital transformation cannot be slowed down.

Given the high stakes, the BFSI industry is considering applying DevSecOps to concentrate more on service delivery speed and security. Financial institutions employing DevOps understand the shift to full DevSecOps adoption, integrating it into their operational practices for success.

There are six elements that we need to take into account in order to implement DevSecOps adoption across teams:

Source code analysis

This entails examining contemporary apps and microservices code in componentized way, allowing for the speedy identification and isolation of vulnerabilities. The real-time telemetry management gives developers more context.

Compliance monitoring

Aids in making software and security teams audit-ready at all times. Additionally, this means that your operations and cloud infrastructure should always be compliant, and that real-time evidence of GDPR compliance, PCI compliance, ISO compliance, and other standards compliance should be gathered.

Change management

By allowing anyone to submit modifications based on objectives and then assess whether the change is good or bad, you may improve this process and raise your speed and efficiency. It is simpler to control possible issues by monitoring such indicators throughout time and tracking delivery by targets.

Threat detection

Identifies potential threats so that your entire team, not just security, can respond swiftly and any extraneous noise is eliminated.

Vulnerability assessment

Combines code analysis with real-time code inspection of newly discovered vulnerabilities. It can notify of how soon issues are addressed and fixed.

Security framework and best practices

How to equip and orient IT engineers and software developers with current, evolving security standards and validations for high performance and productivity across the SDLC. It would be getting better over time if you take advantage of these practices.

Conclusion

You may examine how to combine DevOps and Security using these techniques. To accomplish this, your teams will need to work together more, communicate better, and assume more responsibility. These methods can aid in safeguarding an organization’s digital activities even if DevSecOps is not yet established and deployed.

When you look at the specific responsibilities of DevSecOps, it’s easy to see how they relate to financial industries. Banking software lifecycles are rigorous, and mistakes or the deployment of an unreliable product are not an option. That could have effects ranging from simple user frustration to the creation of vulnerabilities that a hacker could use.

This framework enables financial institutions to quickly deploy software updates while maintaining high security standards. Software development simply cannot be done with the level of assurance that DevSecOps provides. An organization’s culture, philosophy, and security maturity toward appropriate practices must be developed through time. It’s a process that should not be hurried through but rather adopted continuously as it moves toward maturity.

Photo Credit : Tima Miroshnichenko