Why choose Red Hat for DevSecOps?

Many organizations only focus on the application pipeline when implementing DevSecOps, but there are other areas to consider as well. DevSecOps with Red Hat® solutions is not only about helping organizations with their application pipeline in a containerized environment. It’s also about helping them build, deploy, and run applications using DevSecOps practices in both traditional and containerized environments to tackle security issues and vulnerabilities early in the application and infrastructure life cycle.

Red Hat and our security partner ecosystem bring a comprehensive DevSecOps approach to help organizations continue to innovate without sacrificing security. We have the expertise and ability to deliver a robust portfolio to build, deploy, and run security-focused applications across an open hybrid cloud to help organizations wherever they are in their DevSecOps journey.

DevSecOps is a complex undertaking, especially as DevOps tools—and the DevOps process in general—continually grow and change. Then there are additional measures for software security and technologies that enable DevSecOps and allow organizations to do it at scale, using technologies such as containers, Kubernetes, and public cloud services to develop modern applications.

Development and operations teams must make information security—including containers and Kubernetes security—an integral part of the application and infrastructure life cycle from the start. Team members need to safeguard critical IT infrastructure, develop and run security-focused applications, protect confidential data, and keep pace with change.

DevSecOps helps these IT and security teams tackle security issues across people, processes, and technologies, allowing for improved speed and efficiency, better security, enhanced consistency, repeatability, and collaboration. Specifically, DevSecOps can help:

• Improve safety and minimize risks by removing more security vulnerabilities early in the application development and infrastructure life cycle, which can reduce potential production issues.
• Enhance efficiency and speed of DevOps release cycles by removing legacy security practices and tools—and using automation, standardizing on a toolchain, and implementing infrastructure as code, security as code, and compliance as code for repeatability and consistency for an improved development process.
• Lessen risk and increase visibility by implementing security gates early in the application development and infrastructure life cycle to reduce the possibility of human error and improve security, compliance, predictability, and repeatability while reducing audit concerns.

Successfully implementing DevSecOps begins before the application pipeline. As a first step, organizations should make sure their applications and infrastructure are running on software that has built-in security tools and features. Additionally, they should implement a consistent automation strategy across the organization to gain more control of their environments, which is a critical element of the DevSecOps process.

Automation can help them develop security-focused applications and adopt DevSecOps practices early in the development and infrastructure life cycle.

Most organizations focus on the application pipeline when implementing DevSecOps, but there are other areas to consider as well. Red Hat and our security partner ecosystem can help these organizations design, build, deploy, and run security-focused applications using DevSecOps practices in both traditional and containerized environments.

We can help customers wherever they are in their DevSecOps journey. Using the DevSecOps maturity model below, customers can gauge where they are in this journey:

• Beginner: Everything is manual, from creating to deploying applications. Application development, infrastructure and IT operations, and security teams are mostly siloed, and there is very little cross-team collaboration.
• Intermediate: Standardization on some type of toolchain is enabled to accomplish things like infrastructure as code, security as code, and compliance as code using automation in a consistent way across the organization.
• Advanced: Infrastructure and application development are automated, and the organization is now looking to improve processes—including development processes, scaling its existing automation, and implementing DevSecOps at scale using technologies like containers, Kubernetes, and public cloud services. The organization is deploying apps at scale in a dynamic environment for continuous software delivery using advanced deployment techniques, self-service, and auto-scaling.
• Expert: The organization has reached a point where everything is application programming interface (API) first in a cloud-native environment. It is evaluating or using technology models like serverless and microservices, and is taking advantage of artificial intelligence and machine learning to make decisions on security testing and application development.

The security features we’ve built into our open source portfolio make it easier for developers, architects, IT operators, and security teams to implement layered security early in the application development and infrastructure life cycle and stack for DevSecOps. Here are a few of the ways we make this possible.

Foundational security for DevSecOps

We provide foundational security with Red Hat Enterprise Linux® from which organizations can run existing and cloud-native applications consistently across bare-metal, virtual, container, and cloud environments. Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides the important security isolation technologies, strong cryptography, identity and access management, software supply chain security, and independently validated security certifications required for DevSecOps workflows.

Open source technologies that run on top of Red Hat Enterprise Linux—such as Red Hat OpenShift®, Red Hat OpenStack® Platform, and Red Hat Data Services—inherit the security benefits of the foundation Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides.

Complement this with Red Hat Application Foundations, which offers a wide range of out-of-the box application security features such as industry-standard authentication protocols, single sign-on (SSO) and identity management, and role-based access control (RBAC). Develop and modernize software with security in mind and at scale across the hybrid and multicloud environments. 

Read the blog post: The future of Red Hat security data

Standardizing workflows and processes with IT automation

Disparate DevSecOps tools, practices, and processes can impede collaboration, visibility, and productivity while increasing the chance for human error. Automating life-cycle operations offers an ideal opportunity to create consistent, repeatable processes, workflows, and frameworks that simplify interactions among software development, IT infrastructure, and security teams.

Using a single, human-readable language, Red Hat Ansible® Automation Platform includes all the tools, services, and training needed to implement enterprise-wide automation. It delivers a unified, user-friendly automation foundation that promotes collaboration, transparency, and consistency across all aspects of an organization’s IT environment, from applications and security to networks and infrastructure.

DevSecOps at scale with images, containers, clusters, and Kubernetes

OpenShift lets organizations build, deploy, run, and manage security-focused cloud-native applications at scale. Specifically, OpenShift Platform Plus builds on the core platform and includes Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes, Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, and Red Hat Quay.

These technologies let organizations embed security checks into their continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines to give developers vulnerability scanning and policy checking directly from the CI/CD pipeline, protect their workloads and Kubernetes infrastructure against misconfigurations and noncompliance, and implement runtime threat detection and response.

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes helps protect containerized workloads and Kubernetes in all major clouds and hybrid platforms. The platform can be deployed as a fully managed Software as a Service (SaaS) solution, helps mitigate threats, provides continuous scanning and assurance, and protects the Kubernetes infrastructure. Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes is included with Red Hat® OpenShift® Platform Plus, a complete set of powerful, optimized tools to secure, protect, and manage your apps.

OpenShift Platform Plus is built around full-stack automated security and operations, offering a consistent experience across all environments. Its optimization helps improve developer productivity and development processes while ensuring the entire software supply chain is security-focused and compliant. Operations, development, and security teams use OpenShift Platform Plus to work together more efficiently and move ideas from development to production for modern cloud-native application development.

Red Hat OpenShift builds, pipelines, and GitOps—included with OpenShift—provide the necessary components to run source code builds and application packaging on OpenShift. They also provide a flexible framework to plug security-related tasks into the CI/CD pipeline.

Red Hat Application Services offers a wide range of out-of-the box application security features such as industry-standard protocols (e.g., OAuth/OpenID, JWT Tokens), single sign-on (SSO) and identity management, role-based access control (RBAC), cluster authentication, and in-cluster encryption. 

Our security partner ecosystem helps customers extend and enhance their capabilities to secure their applications and infrastructure using DevSecOps practices. By combining our portfolio and services with this ecosystem, customers can address key security challenges like:

• Compliance and governance 
• Identity and access management
• Vulnerability and configuration management
• Platform security
• Network controls
• Data controls
• Security controls
• Runtime analysis and protection
• Logging  and monitoring
• Remediation

Red Hat Services can help translate your technology investments into measurable and meaningful business outcomes. From culture and business processes to training and certification, we can help you get started on your DevSecOps journey.