The Top Tactics to Be Successful at Secure DevOps

Today’s increasingly connected world, with access to mobile devices and cloud scale computing, is leading to disruption in business models and processes. To succeed, you have no option but to continuously deliver new value to customers at the increasing speed that they demand.

Mark Andreessen, the founder of Netscape, said a few years back that “software is eating the world, in all sectors.” We are seeing more and more organizations undergoing transformations as technology companies. Digitalization and adoption of Agile and DevOps practices has changed the way we create software.

Indeed, we created software using the Waterfall methodology for a very long time. It required extensive planning from the beginning and was slow in delivering finished products. In time, Agile replaced Waterfall and, in so doing, shifted the focus to shipping smaller increments of software with requirements evolving through the collaborative effort of self-organizing teams and end-users. It taps the voice of the customer early and often, ensuring that the organization is building the right products and features as well as delivering them with quality and predictability.

DevOps compounds these benefits by enhancing collaboration among the software development and IT operations teams. This accelerates and improves the process of software delivery and encourages constant collaboration. The result is more reliable releases, which ultimately help deliver an exceptional end-user experience. DevOps practices can be summarized as “a business-driven approach to deliver solutions using agile methods, collaboration, and automation.”

Secure DevOps Practices

The formalization of the term DevOps came at the 2009 Velocity Conference where John Allspaw and Paul Hammond from Flickr presented how they do 10 deploys per day. The concepts shown by Allspaw and Hammond are now standard components of the DevOps movement. Their formalization, not to mention the adoption of Agile and DevOps practices, has led (Read more...)