Many organisations have adopted agile strategies like DevOps to help accelerate software delivery. But as the cloud becomes integral to corporate IT strategy, it has become clear that DevOps is missing a key component – security. To address this shortcoming we are seeing the rise of DevSecOps.
Instead of treating security as something that is fixed after development, a DevSecOps approach ensures it is a primary consideration of workload transformation as software is written and deployed to the cloud. Like DevOps before it, DevSecOps uses automation to accelerate certain tasks throughout the development cycle – and this is where the Oracle Cloud can assist.
Two security services included as standard
Whichever model of cloud you choose (hybrid or public), the reality is that infrastructure becomes more complex. Complexity increases risk, which is why security needs to be built into every phase of the development cycle.
In a continuous development / continuous integration (CI/CD) environment, security testing and enforcement needs to be automated – and that’s where Oracle can help. The Oracle Cloud now offers two features designed to assist with secure workload transformation.
Oracle Security Zones
Defining security standards in advance will help to ensure each deployment is properly secured to reduce risk. Oracle Security Zones allow you to pre-define rules and then automatically test each code commit to ensuring it complies. Anything that fails the test is sandboxed until corrected.
Oracle Security Zone is a preventative safeguard, allowing you to catch insecure code updates before they can reach production – or be exploited by bad actors.
Oracle Cloud Guard
Oracle Cloud Guard has been designed to help users understand the overall risk and security posture of their cloud-hosted assets. This service acts as a command centre for cloud security posture management, scaling automatically as your resource usage grows.
Oracle Cloud Guard offers comprehensive coverage of the entire Oracle Cloud ecosystem. This gives users complete visibility of their security – including infrastructure API, CLI and SDKs. Importantly, it also allows them to better direct resources to where they are needed most during an incident.
Positioning your cloud infrastructure for a secure future
With proactive and reactive tools at their disposal, Oracle Cloud users are better positioned to achieve truly secure workload transformation without significant resource overheads. Equally important is the fact that security safeguards are now embedded in the environment. This ensures that any user can operate securely in the cloud.
It’s also worth noting that Oracle Cloud Infrastructure is still the only hosted platform that has been built from the outset using security-first design principles. Other cloud providers include security as part of their offering – but it has been retrofitted – which is exactly the problem that the DevSecOps methodology seeks to avoid.
When hosting on Oracle cloud you know that the underlying cloud platform and the code you host on it have been properly hardened from the outset. To learn more about workload transformation using Oracle Cloud – and how the bundled tools will help you implement a DevSecOps approach to application deployment – please give us a call