What is SecOps?

Enterprise IT organizations face a common problem in the establishment of effective communication and collaboration among departments. Cloud-based applications may have a dedicated team of developers that creates new updates and patches. An operations team manages the application’s performance. A security team maintains security and responds to cyber threats.

These teams can cause problems if they are not closely linked. This is because their objectives and activities are often kept very separate from the organization’s structure. Developers are motivated by the release of new code on a regular basis or according to a pre-determined time frame. IT operations teams are motivated for application uptime, and IT security teams are motivated for security breaches. Conflict can occur when these objectives are not aligned.

• Developers release unstable updates and IT operations teams are left managing the performance of the update.
• Unknown security flaws in code are released by developers, which can cause problems for IT security teams
• IT operations teams make changes to improve application uptime, but create security vulnerabilities. IT security analysts are left to fix the problems that will inevitably arise.

IT managers have been trying to decrease friction between different working groups within IT by using new methods that encourage collaboration and process integration among departments that previously operated in isolation.

SecOps is an IT management methodology to improve communication, collaboration, and communication between IT security working teams and IT operations working groups. This helps ensure that IT organizations can achieve their application and network security goals without compromising application performance. 

SecOps is a combination of security and operations. This is the same way that DevOps, the most popular IT management methodology, derives its name. SecOps is also known as DevSecOps when the organization attempts simultaneously to eliminate information and activity silos within IT.

What are SecOps’ Goals?

SecOps’ overarching goal is to make sure that organizations don’t compromise security while they work to meet application performance, development timelines, and uptime requirements. For SecOps to be successful, it is essential that management buy-in is obtained and that a timeline for improving security within the organization is established.

IT organizations need to establish cross-department collaboration in order to bring application security features and aspects earlier in the development process. The typical software development cycle starts with requirement analysis and planning, followed by the creation of product architecture and requirements. After the product has been built, it will need to be tested thoroughly before being deployed in the production environment.

Security considerations can be overlooked in traditional models. This is a problem. SecOps solves this problem by encouraging collaboration between operations and security teams throughout development. This ensures that security features are included in the development process so that they have minimal impact on the application’s performance.