5 Critical Steps to Ensure Your Pipeline Security

The digital transformation that has swept across all industry sectors means that every business is now a software business. As such, it needs to protect the development process by building security into it, without sacrificing speed and agility that keep your product competitive.

However, many organizations still lag behind, when it comes to building security into their software development life cycle (SDLC). Too many development teams still think of security as a bottleneck - a problem that forces them to rework code they thought had been completed. This waste of time prevents them from developing new features.

The Best Practice

Insecure software puts your business at increasing risk. New features are not going to protect you or your customers, if your product is open to exploitation by hackers. Your team needs to integrate security by developing secure software processes that enable, rather than inhibit, delivery of high-quality highly secure products.

The Main Problem

The later a bug or a vulnerability is found in the SDLC, the more expensive it becomes to fix. When a bug is found late in the cycle, developers must drop the work they are doing, and go back to revisit a code they may have written weeks ago. Even worse, when a critical security flaw is found in production, fixing it impact the product availability (SLA).

Here are 5 steps to secure your pipeline:

1. Perform SAST scans
2. Control who can promote code
3. Control the use of AI tools
4. Perform integration testings
5. Control, Monitor and Analyze access