When developing production-grade platforms, both speed and security are high up on the list of project objectives. With the broad range of cyber risks and the concerning consequences of data breaches, businesses cannot afford to overlook any security essentials.

A security failure can be catastrophic to a brand’s reputation, leave the company liable to significant financial penalties and can cause costly outages, so getting a highly effective security framework in place is more important than ever.

DevOps security strategies help to bridge the gap between development and production, bringing security measures into the equation at an earlier stage of the development lifecycle, minimizing vulnerabilities.

These are some of the security essentials for production-grade platforms for reducing risk exposure within today’s challenging digital landscape:

Day One Security Protocols

By introducing security measures and principles from the start of the development stage, you decrease the chance of risks being overlooked. Early security adoption involves automated security checks and secure coding standards from the very start.

Strong Identity and Access Management (IAM)

One of the biggest security risks on production-grade platforms is compromised credentials, sometimes through poor password management by employees but often this can be through sophisticated tricks such as phishing emails.

An essential element of security for production-grade platforms is having effective identity and access management processes and policies in place. This means setting up access management processes such as role based access which only provides higher risk access levels to users who essentially require that access to perform their role. Access should also be time limited and regularly reviewed.

Defined access levels should be meticulously mapped out to avoid providing users with permissions to perform actions that are not required under their job remit. Access policies should be defined separately for development, staging and production.

Another key area of access management is to implement multi factor authorization for all users and leavers should have access automatically removed immediately.

Monitoring and Threat Detection

For many businesses, demonstrating effective monitoring of suspicious activity and threat detection is required by regulators. For instance, for an online casino to be issued with a license, it is required to provide evidence of adequate processes and systems in place to monitor unusual activity so that any threats can be quickly investigated.

Production-grade platforms will typically implement automated monitoring and protection systems that can lock accounts after suspicious behavior. Essentials also include a Web Application Firewall and DDoS mitigation.

Data Protection Security

A robust security framework will also include encryption technology for data at rest and in transit, secure backups and access logging. Data retention policies should be in force, with automated flagging of data that is due to be deleted and then secure deletion processes will follow.

Incident Response Plans

Another critical part of the security framework for production-grade platforms is to have strong incident response plans with regular testing to ensure actions are carried out as needed. The plan should include detailed steps for the recovery actions required to ensure that there is minimal impact if a breach or another type of incident occurs, to reduce downtime, cost and any reputational/trust damage.

The frequency of backups can make a significant difference in the recovery phase, so the set up for backups should be regularly reviewed to ensure that it meets the needs of the business to minimize costly downtime and prevent data loss.

Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Essential DevOps security includes Continuous Integration (CI) checks for code changes and tests to identify any errors, which helps to catch bugs before they become an issue. Once the CI automation is completed and the code passes the tests, it moves to the deployment stage so it is ready to go live when required.

Secure Payment Gateways

Platforms that include payment transactions also have to implement security controls to protect customers’ finances and banking details. This includes using third party payment processors and tokenization to replace card data with tokens.

Platforms with card payments are required to comply with PCI-DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards) to protect against fraud. These are global standards for any business taking card payments from Visa, Mastercard etc. The standards require merchants to meet requirements such as implementing firewalls, using encryption and monitoring and testing networks.

Conclusion

These are some of the standard essentials for DevOps security for production-grade platforms but there may be additional requirements depending on the industry and regulations that apply across different geographical locations. 

Failure to comply with security regulations can result in severe financial penalties and can damage a company’s reputation, so security is always the number one priority when developing new platforms and maintaining existing ones.

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