Your team is rushing to deploy a new system. How do you ensure security isn't compromised in the process?

Please make sure your security team is engaged early on. By involving security guard rails at the design phase you can prevent time squeeze towards a release. At the same time, you should evaluate the criticality of the system and adjust the process based on that factor. It is senseless to spend days on evaluating a system that does not contain critical or sensitive data. Be proportional in your approach, this will help the business focus on what is really important

Secure development lifecycles (and adjourning automation) are essential. Ensure your processes include automated controls like, version control, branching strategies, linting, testing, static (and dynamic) application security testing. By automating your guardrails you can prevent delays while ensuring security is not compromised.

Teams prefer to integrate DevOps to maintain security, even when deployment deadlines are tight. By incorporating automated checks at every stage of the deployment pipeline, they ensure continuous monitoring of security concerns without slowing down the deployment process. This allows for continuous deployment, meaning security updates and patches can be applied immediately without waiting for scheduled maintenance windows. Additionally, DevOps fosters a collaborative culture between development, operations, and security teams, making security a shared responsibility. DevOps practices are designed to scale with the system, allowing for rapid changes and improvements without compromising security.

DevSecOps is a way of living. You should train your employees to operate within this space of mind. Perform threat models, take proportional and effective measures, while standardizing and automating repetitive security tasks and functions. For example, you could use a centralized service to perform certain security tasks, like content sanitization or encoding and make this service available to new projects allowing for re-used

Do not forget to train your business stakeholders on your process. By ensuring your stakeholders understand the process and the necessity, they may schedule time for your security processes from the start!

Please make sure you apply proportional security checks and measures to your projects. Do not build a 15 ft. fence around a candy store and do not skimp on access controls for a bank vault ;)