Security has been mainly separated from software development since the dawn of modern computing. With attackers always coming up with new ways to damage their victims’ assets, it’s becoming more important than ever for businesses to limit their attack surfaces.

Collaboration and shared ownership of cybersecurity between security and engineering are required to combat hackers. Given the significant shift in attacker focus in today’s hybrid environment, now is the time to include security into the development process. Implementing a shift-left security strategy is the best method to accomplish this.

CISOs are increasingly recognising the fact, that being hacked is a question of when, not if. Most businesses have had a data breach at some point, without their awareness. This puts a lot of pressure on businesses to reduce the risk of not only security breaches, but also to meet their data privacy obligations to their customers. Shifting left refers to the idea of addressing security concerns, earlier in the software development lifecycle. It is a modern approach to shifting left that can have a significant impact on risk reduction and help cloud- native development teams strike a healthy balance of freedom and responsibility.

Evolution of shift left strategy

In its most basic form, “shift left” security refers to moving security into the development process as early as possible. It makes an attempt to integrate security into the software development lifecycle in a meaningful way. Previously, security checks were performed just prior to the code being released into production.

Although it uncovered security flaws, it also resulted in technical teams working at the last minute to patch them, causing delays and harming user experience.

When there were no technologies, release cycles were longer, and the “Waterfall model” was widely used. With the introduction of the Agile development lifecycle, the rate of release into production has grown, posing new obstacles in the entire process cycle of testing and issue resolution.

This approach, often known as DevSecOps, begins security testing early in the software development lifecycle. Rather than relying solely on security testing conducted when the application is released into production, the aim is to incorporate security testing into each phase of the CI-CD (Continuous Integration-Continuous Deployment) pipeline.

Each developer is responsible for the solution’s security, and the process partly empowers developers to check the security of their code early in the cycle, which could be accomplished by implementing a series of checks for every change in the codebase before it is approved as a “Production Ready” build.

Shift left strategy in a remote/hybrid work environment

With the onset of remote work, the hybrid environment makes it difficult to provide constant mentoring on security from senior to junior developers and has brought its own set of limitations. The technique allows senior engineers to concentrate on the issues that need to be addressed rather than having to go over every line of code.

Business commitment delivery can be achieved without compromising security by using relevant technologies and making minimal modifications to processes.

Key elements for a successful shift left strategy

It is critical to define what shift-left means in an organisation. This is about including key items on vision, ownership/responsibility, milestones, and metrics. When shifting security to the left, there are a few things to consider:

Secure coding training for developers: Ongoing training and examinations of developers’ secure coding knowledge. It is critical that programmers write secure code. Their understanding of fresh threats and vulnerabilities must be current.

Security in Design: Involving the security team early in the design process allows the security team and developers to determine the appropriate controls and methodologies for meeting the business needs.

Secure Coding Training: Continuing training and assessments on the knowledge of the developers on secure coding, newer threats, and vulnerabilities is imperative.

Ongoing infrastructure baseline validation: The application’s security is highly dependent on the security of the underlying infrastructure. It is necessary to harden the infrastructure to fulfil the security baseline. It is critical to test the infrastructure’s security on a regular basis, especially after a release or a change has been deployed.

Monitoring: Because attackers are always looking for flaws in systems, businesses should have systems in place that constantly monitor the application and its underlying infrastructure. The alerts and lessons learned from these tries/attacks must be examined on a regular basis and incorporated into developer training or used to improve security checks in the development to deployment process.

The Shift-Left methodology is meant to effectively and efficiently address these issues. In the early stages of development, it blends both technology and procedures. The developers are empowered to identify security gaps and fix them by leveraging technology or education early in the development cycle, resulting in code that has already been subjected to several security checks/reviews. As a result, the number of issues found during the Pre-Deployment phase by the security team may be reduced.

While less intrusive in functionality, Digital Adoption Platforms have the potential to compromise the security of Customer applications if not designed and developed securely. For example, static code reviews can help detect vulnerabilities that may enable intruders to take control of the end-user’s browser or capture sensitive information from the end user’s browser.

Periodic automated scanning helps businesses identify any changes to the platform that could have an impact on the security of the DAP platform or customer’s application. Also, continuous monitoring of the application and infrastructure informs customers in time if they are being subjected to any direct or indirect attacks.

Shifting left will be key to securing business in 2021

In today’s threat landscape, a reactive approach will no longer suffice, regardless of how an organisation approaches security concerns. Those who do not take the effort to develop an effective shift left strategy will be left behind and lose their competitive advantage in an environment where security has become a differentiator. In the worst-case scenario, it might constitute an existential threat if no effort is made to address it.

Shift-Left Security Program will help businesses successfully navigate the security transformation required to support DevOps and software defined environments. By implementing shift left and adopting a DevSecOps mindset, businesses can foster collaboration and knowledge sharing between developers, operations teams and security experts.

The writer is VP, Information Security, Whatfix