Security breaches are the new normal. As developers prioritize app security, DevOps has been evolving into DevSecOps, and organizations are looking for ways to enhance and integrate security within their DevOps cultures. This is especially true within Salesforce, which just celebrated 10 million installs on its AppExchange. Following are tips to implement and embrace DevSecOps for Salesforce environments.

Defining DevSecOps and Why It Is Important for Salesforce

DevSecOps lies at the intersection of DevOps and security. Although the original intent of DevOps was to make security an integral part of the entire app life cycle, this intent often gets lost. Perhaps the Salesforce DevOps team has spent months working on different solutions, and when the security team is introduced, these solutions are eliminated or heavily burdened with changes due to security issues. Integrating security right at the outset can save crucial time and resources. Although Salesforce has profiles, permission sets, and sharing rules to manage security, these are not sufficient to fully protect the application’s data, settings, and source code, as there is no structured release process or merge conflict resolution tools or compliance built into it.

While many customers do a thorough risk assessment when considering Salesforce, they often skip past evaluating security robustness when it comes to a DevOps solution. Moreover, even as enterprises use Salesforce Shield, they often end up giving the DevOps vendor backdoor access to their data. While this can be prevented in vendor selection, it is not enough. Embracing DevSecOps allows enterprises that use Salesforce to build secured applications without compromising the time to market. By implementing proactive security and compliance processes, DevSecOps accelerates software releases, enhances product security, and saves operational and development costs while also ensuring robust security and compliance from the start.

5 Ways to Strengthen DevSecOps

Many enterprises adopt DevOps from the technology and time-to-market perspective without striking the right balance between people, processes, and technology. When enterprises miss having balanced automation, there is often an increase in instances of data breaches and security breaches. Speed is irrelevant when heading in the wrong direction. Speed combined with safety and security is a great asset. Therefore, security must be integrated into every aspect of the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), and where possible, it should be automated.

There are many ways to approach DevSecOps. Here are five ways to make a shift to a stronger DevSecOps environment:

1. Define Your Security Templates

   Why should you have security templates? Whenever a developer or anyone deploys a change, it will always check against that security template or image. Alerts will then be raised if the security configuration doesn’t match.

    

2. Improve Collaboration between Developer and Security Teams

   Typically, the security team will set up Salesforce as part of the implementation and then go away. The Salesforce team is then focused on managing the Salesforce instance, and security is not regularly reviewed.

    

3. Cross-Train Developer and Security Teams

   Take collaboration a step further and do cross-training. Train your development team on security aspects and train your security team on Salesforce. The reality is that security teams do not generally know how to manage the security of a Salesforce instance, and the development team is not aware of the many security aspects that impact their work.

    

4. Automate All Security Operations

   If you add up all the bits for profiles, permission sets, and more for a mid-size instance, companies must manage millions and millions of bits of information. This is not humanly possible. The best way to properly manage this is to automate it and match it to security configurations.

    

5. Perform Regular Security Audits

Security audits are not just useful when you are getting started. They can be performed regularly to make sure each instance is locked up, and templates are upgraded. If a full audit is not feasible on a recurring basis, consider reviewing key laws and the areas that impact those laws.

Embracing DevSecOps Culture

Security will continue to be a top priority, and embedding security into the DevOps pipeline may seem like a complex proposition, requiring many changes in processes and procedures. With the right partners and internal culture support, embracing DevSecOps may be closer than you think.