What is SecOps? DevSecOps, Use Cases and Implementation Guide

DevOps—a methodology that brings together development (Dev) and operations (Ops)—has improved software development. Software teams that follow the DevOps approach can coordinate their priorities and communicate with each other to produce high-quality work and accelerate time to market. 

Security wasn't a focus of the DevOps idea. However, as the cyber threat landscape expands and cyberattacks and data breaches become more common, software teams are now incorporating security considerations into their DevOps ecosystem. 

SecOps is a new approach to software development in which security and operations teams work together to ensure security is considered throughout the software development lifecycle. The approach "operationalizes" security to strengthen the software environment so organizations can meet their application security and performance goals. 

What is Security Operations (SecOps)?

Security Operations or SecOps for short is a combination of IT operations and security staff that ensures an efficient focus on monitoring and assessing an organization’s risk and protecting company assets. 

According to the video above, SecOps can be summarized into these use cases:

• Eliminating vulnerabilities
• Reducing risks
• Maintaining business agility

SecOps encourages collaboration between these teams and its overall goal is to create a security-conscious team and ensure that application security is not sacrificed for development time, uptime, or performance.

What Does a Security Operations (SecOps) Team Do. The goal of SecOps is to eliminate vulnerabilities and reduce risk while maintaining business agility by uniting security and operations. To ensure this collaboration, SecOps teams leverage the processes, tools, practices, and personnel of the Security Operations Center (SOC). 

Below is the work of the SecOps teams:

• Monitoring the entire IT environment, including local assets and cloud infrastructure. 
• Collecting threat intelligence, i.e. evidence-based and contextual knowledge about potential threats and the threat tools, goals, motives, and attack behavior of attackers.
• Implementation of measures to minimize the harmful effects of a security incident.
• Conducting digital forensics to find the root cause of an incident, strengthen the company's cyber defenses, and prevent a repeat attack.

What are the Benefits of SecOps for Companies?

SecOps offers many benefits for companies in different industries. By eliminating the silos between the operations and security teams, SecOps can help companies in the following ways: 

• Secure technology and development environments.
• Quickly identifies security gaps.
• Cross-team collaboration: Security-related problems can be solved quickly
• Fewer configuration errors and fewer application disruptions because code changes are linked to deployment rules.
• Advises on risk management processes and helps strengthen corporate security.

With a SecOps approach, teams can build security into the development environment from the beginning, ensuring that the final product is free of most—and if possible all—vulnerabilities. 

The SecOps team can also proactively review and apply security policies to prevent security incidents and quickly resolve issues. What's more, these policies can be defined as "policies-as-code" and applied automatically and globally to every IT resource. This approach continuously protects the business from threats while helping to maintain the pace of innovation. 

Finally, SecOps improves communication and information sharing between teams so they can better identify vulnerabilities, implement remediation in real time, and then respond to incidents. It also improves overall IT hygiene. SecOps can also automate many security processes to reduce the burden on teams while making the development environment more secure. 

What is SecOps Automation?

SecOps automation streamlines the workflows of employees across the SecOps spectrum. Because SecOps has brought IT and cybersecurity together into a more cohesive team, organizations have been able to benefit from faster, more efficient processes. 

The Key Team Roles in SecOps

To illustrate how automation can make a tangible difference, let's take a closer look at the five key roles of SecOps teams. These are: 

• Incident Manager: This role is responsible for monitoring and configuring the security tools and prioritizing incidents identified by the tools.
• Security Investigator: In the event of an incident, this role identifies affected devices and systems, conducts threat analysis, and implements risk mitigation strategies.
• Advanced Security Analyst: This role may sometimes focus on discovering new threats like a security investigator for unknown threats.
• Security Operations Center (SOC) Manager: The manager has direct oversight of the SOC and is the interface between the security team and the higher-level business leaders. This person is familiar with each role and can guide the team toward greater efficiency and collaboration.
• Security Engineer/Architect: This role focuses on implementing, deploying, and maintaining an organization's security tools. Since they manage the overall security architecture, they define what features and visibility the team can handle.

With the roles defined in the infographics above, it's easier to see how automation promises such great benefits for the SecOps space. 

Use Case Examples of SecOps Automation

Using automation, SecOps can meet critical enterprise security needs by optimizing processes and improving efficiency. Below are important use case examples:

Threat Detection and Response

Threat detection has always been one of the most time-consuming tasks for companies: Given the need for comprehensive visibility, hyper-granular monitoring platforms such as Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools have been developed over a decade of cybersecurity advances. 

However, the ever-increasing volume and complexity of security data has led to greater strain on upstream systems, such as incident responders.

Since traditional, manual methods of monitoring and analyzing security events can hardly keep up with the speed and volume that modern organizations require, automation is one of the highest ROI use cases. By integrating with the existing SIEM tool, automation can process larger volumes of data much faster than humans.

Incident Response

In traditional manual workflows, tasks such as prioritizing alerts, collecting data, and executing a response often require a lot of time and effort. Because Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) tools span the full range of an organization's security tools, they can automate incident response. This means that responding to a threat can happen right at the endpoint where it originates.

Email, for example, has always been a significant source of threat. When the SecOps team is confronted with a phishing email, they typically don't notice any wrongdoing until the user has fallen for it and the device has attempted to load the suspicious URL. 

Worse, a central SIEM tool may not even register a phishing site - especially if it steals surreptitiously entered credentials. SOAR tools can respond immediately on several fronts: At the network level, they can detect that the phishing site is suspicious based on the firewall's IP reputation. 

At the endpoint level, they can use natural language processing to flag the grammatical warning signs of a phishing message. Both enable action: first, denying the user access to the fake login page, and then flagging the email and forwarding it to the SecOps team for analysis.

SOAR automation not only automates SecOps' incident response functions but also decentralizes its just-in-time capabilities so that SecOps can secure remote endpoints.

Compliance Management

SecOps can automate compliance management in some ways: from basic log management tasks to higher-level threat management aspects. By centralizing and aggregating logs, system configurations, and incident details, SOAR platforms enable comprehensive data retention. 

While this is basic, it is nonetheless crucial: both Article 30 of GDPR and ISO 27001 explicitly require that log records, reports, and documentation are up to date. By automatically centralizing and storing this data, SOAR can significantly reduce the administrative burden on SecOps teams.

The pressure for accountability in modern compliance frameworks does not end with clear and centralized data retention: it must also be demonstrated that role-based access controls are being followed.  SOAR ensures that only authorized personnel can perform certain tasks because it is implemented with Identity and Access Management (IAM) controls. 

However, SOAR goes beyond simply verifying credentials and considers all data streams before granting access to a user or device. Location, time, OTP success, and requested resources; can all play a role in authorization without affecting the legitimate end user.

Vulnerability Management

Automated patch management simplifies the otherwise tedious process of monitoring and manually applying patches. By automating these tasks, organizations can remediate vulnerabilities more quickly and efficiently, ensuring critical systems remain secure.

Integrating a SOAR platform with your organization's configuration management system simplifies the ongoing requirements of patch management. Vulnerability management automation can continuously monitor the status of different system versions and identify deviations from the approved security baseline. 

When a missing patch is detected, the SOAR platform can initiate an automated remediation process to apply the patch. It then performs an independent review to confirm that the patch was successfully implemented. 

Should the patch process be unsuccessful, or certain systems are excluded from automated patch management for operational reasons, the SOAR platform flags those issues for manual review. This means no vulnerabilities are missed.

User Behavior Analysis (UBA)

UBA is at the heart of SOAR functionality. This is made possible because SOAR platforms aggregate data from a variety of data sources, including endpoint detection systems, access logs, and network traffic monitors. 

Taken together, each data point represents an action or decision made by an end user. UBA tools enable SOAR to analyze this data and establish behavioral baselines for each user or entity. For example, a user's typical work hours, device usage, or data access patterns are recorded over time. 

When deviations occur—such as accessing sensitive files at unusual times or a device initiating abnormal network connections—the SOAR platform flags them as potential threats.

Once anomalous behavior is detected, the SOAR platform automates the response process. 

For example, when UEBA detects suspicious activity, the platform can initiate predefined workflows, such as temporarily restricting access, notifying security teams, or launching an investigation into the organization's recent activities. 

These workflows ensure rapid action while minimizing disruption to legitimate operations.

Important SecOps Tools

A “layered” approach to security is essential to SecOp's success. In addition to standard perimeter defense systems like firewalls and VPNs, today’s SecOps-led organizations like also need more sophisticated tools to harden defenses, protect assets, and proactively respond to cyber threats and risks. 

This includes: 

• DNS security platforms prevent attackers from exploiting the company's DNS to compromise corporate resources and exfiltrate or access data. 
• Anti-phishing tools to analyze and mitigate email-based threats. 
• Data collection platforms to discover and secure sensitive data. 
• Network Detection and Response (NDR)  to analyze typical network traffic for suspicious behavior and to detect and respond to threats in the network using machine learning and data analysis.
• Packet capture and storage tools to analyze data packets and investigate the full extent of a cyber attack or data breach.

Network detection and response (NDR), along with security information and event management (SIEM) platforms and endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, should also be a key element of the layered security approach in SecOps. This enables security teams to detect and remediate threats after an initial compromise but before an intrusion, strengthening the organization's defenses - even against advanced threats.

Organizations also have the option to implement security policies as code to protect their assets from threats and should adopt tools that standardize security incident tracking and support automated incident identification, prioritization, and remediation through a single central platform. 

Automated tools are a critical element of a SecOps program. Automation frees human analysts from manual tasks and allows them to focus on key SecOps strategies, prioritize different types of threats, and implement the best possible remediation strategies for existing and new risks. 

At a minimum, a SecOps program should have automated tools for the following: 

• Incident detection, response, and analysis 
• Analysis of the environment  
• Gamification of security training 

Challenges Faced By Security Operations (SecOps)

As security risks have increased immensely and organizations are forced to operate in a complex threat landscape, SecOps offers numerous benefits for organizations of all sizes. And yet, many fail to implement this methodology to increase security throughout the SDLC. 

The reason for this is that SecOps unfortunately comes with certain challenges. Thankfully, organizations can overcome these challenges with automated and cutting-edge tools and solutions as offered by the Zyneto Managed Detection and Response service.

Spread of Sophisticated Cyber Gangs. According to a recent study of 500 CISOs and other security leaders, the majority of SecOps professionals said ransomware is the biggest threat to their organization. This finding is not surprising, as 85% of them have been affected by a ransomware attack in the last 5 years, and 98% of these attacks resulted in business downtime, data loss, and costly fines. 

In addition to ransomware gangs, many organizations are also concerned about phishing, social engineering, data exfiltration, and supply chain attacks. All of these threats, combined with several high-profile attacks in 2021, are among the biggest challenges facing SecOps teams. 

Shortage of Skilled Workers. Companies urgently need experienced SecOps personnel to be able to defend against the increasing, increasingly complex security threats. But this is exactly what many companies are failing to do. There is a huge shortage of qualified cybersecurity personnel, especially in the areas of endpoint security, data security, and network security. 

In addition, the turnover rate in SecOps is very high due to low job satisfaction and high burnout. These problems and the resulting serious shortage of experienced personnel prevent real security threats and vulnerabilities from being adequately analyzed. 

Such bottlenecks prevent companies from conducting security operations effectively. In a 2021 SANS survey,  61% of respondents said that the lack of skilled workers is their biggest SecOps problem. These bottlenecks prevent companies from conducting security operations effectively. 

Complex Hybrid Environments. Modern enterprise IT environments are no longer narrowly defined by perimeter firewalls and on-premises resources. Instead, many companies now have hybrid environments that include both on-premises and cloud-based resources, as well as remote workers, mobile devices, and even shadow IT. 

These new developments are presenting numerous security challenges to organizations around the world. First, security personnel must think about how to protect both on-premises and cloud-based resources. They must also protect users, many of whom work from outside the company's security perimeter. All of these factors are easier said than done. 

Lack of Automation. As IT infrastructure grows larger and more complex, it becomes more difficult to manually secure corporate security. Reviewing and responding to alerts raised by security tools such as SIEM platforms is part of this process. All seemingly simple tasks are essential to implementing cybersecurity measures. 

Automated solutions can reduce the number of manual tasks and increase the effectiveness of SecOps. With good, automated tools, SecOps teams can also keep up with large volumes of events and log entries generated by monitored systems. These tools can also help them sort through alerts and act accordingly to mitigate threats and continuously protect the organization.

The Differences Between SecOps vs. DevSecOps vs. DevOps

The terms SecOps and DevSec are not as common as others, but they are actual IT definitions. Below, we explain the differences between these terms:

SecOps. SecOps, an abbreviation for Security Operations, describes the cooperation between security teams and IT operations teams. The goal of both teams is to ensure that security risks are reduced and the efficiency/stability of the IT infrastructure is maintained.

DevSec. DevSec, short for Development Security, is concerned with integrating security practices directly into the software development process. Unlike DevSecOps, which focuses on cooperation between development, security, and operations teams, DevSec focuses primarily on the development aspect. 

DevSec aims to encourage developers to consider security aspects from the very beginning of the development process. This should minimize the risk of security vulnerabilities in the finished products.

DevOps. DevOps is one of the most used IT terms of the last ten years. DevOps is a combination of the terms "development" and "operations" and refers to a culture, practices, and tools that promote collaboration and communication between software development and IT operations. 

The use of DevOps should accelerate the software development cycle while ensuring the quality and stability of the software including the underlying infrastructure.

DevSecOps and SecDevOps. There is no point in describing the terms SecDevOps and DevSecOps separately, although the spelling is different. Both terms refer to the same concept and can be used interchangeably.

Incorporating security into the software development cycle from the beginning to reduce the risk of security gaps and vulnerabilities is the main goal of SecDevOps and DevSecOps.

The differences could be described very abstractly as follows:

• SecDevOps emphasizes security (Sec) as an extension of the DevOps approach.
• DevSecOps emphasizes the integration of security (Sec) into the DevOps process.

The methods, practices, and tools used (e.g. automated security tests, and security checks in the code review process) are the same. Below is a table summarizing their differences:

Term	Definition	Focus Area	Key Teams Involved	Primary Goal
SecOps	Security Operations – a collaboration between security and IT operations teams.	IT infrastructure security and operational stability.	Security Teams, IT Operations Teams	Reduce security risks and maintain IT infrastructure efficiency and stability.
DevOps	Development and Operations – a culture, practices, and tools to enhance collaboration between these teams.	Streamlining and automating the software development lifecycle while maintaining software quality and stability.	Development Teams, IT Operations Teams	Accelerate the software development cycle while ensuring software quality and infrastructure stability.
DevSec	Development Security – integrates security directly into the software development process.	Security in the development phase of software.	Developers	Ensure developers prioritize security from the start to minimize security vulnerabilities in the final product.
DevSecOps / SecDevOps	Development, Security, and Operations – integrates security into the DevOps process.	Incorporating security practices into the DevOps workflow.	Development Teams, Security Teams, Operations Teams	Ensure security is embedded into every stage of the DevOps process to reduce vulnerabilities and ensure secure software delivery.

Step-by-Step Guide to Implementing the Best SecOps Solutions

While DevOps is already widespread, more and more companies are now realizing that it is crucial not only to integrate development and operations more closely but also to always consider security from the outset. 

The SecOps approach takes this into account. But just like DevOps, this approach is not a product that you buy or a solution that you implement. It requires a cultural change in the company. 

How can you formulate a strategy for DevSecOps against this background? Below is a step guide on how this can be achieved:

Step 1: The Definition Phase. First, you need to thoroughly analyze your security architecture to understand how applications work and communicate, including policies from cloud providers. Once you have a full overview, companies can start defining mandatory operating standards. 

This should include things like minimum requirements for security testing and fixed timeframes for remediation. You also need to decide what security tests to perform and what metrics to use to measure success.

Step 2: The Design Phase. This step is all about ensuring that development and test environments are secure. This requires strict access controls for CI/CD pipelines and additional monitoring for scripts running in the background. Developers should also be trained on common threat types.

Step 3: The Development Phase. Once the prerequisites have been met, a key point can now be addressed: automating testing. To do this, developers need secure repositories. Companies should enable access to secure and internally released open-source libraries. 

Using a combination of analysis tools and scripts, those responsible can ensure that developers only work with the released versions. Companies should also establish Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST). This method can be used to identify vulnerabilities at runtime before code goes into production.

Step 4: The Test Phase. In keeping with the "Shift Left" approach, testing should begin as early as possible in the software lifecycle. Companies want to find bugs in their software before criminals do. In addition, test environments should also be continuously checked to ensure their efficiency. 

By running different tests in parallel, you can identify the methods that slow down the system and replace them with more effective ones.

Step 5: The Pre-Release Phase. Now it's all about combining security and speed. To do this, companies should also use flexible on-demand services from the cloud. Production environments should also be secured against data leaks by using tools such as data masking or tokenization, which ensure that developers have all test data available, but without access to sensitive information.

Step 6: The Deployment Phase. Now you should launch individual test balloons to see whether the code that worked before deployment also runs in the deployment. 

If the deployment then needs to be expanded, companies can use the blue-green or red-black deployment methods or run the old and new code in parallel on their servers. If errors occur, the load balancers fall back to the old code. 

Another method is so-called canary testing. This involves switching individual sessions to a new code. If errors are discovered, the corresponding code is withdrawn and the problems are fixed. As a third method, new code elements can be activated and deactivated using feature tagging. If event errors are found in a new section of code, developers can deactivate the function until the problem is fixed.