94% of enterprises of all sizes are in the cloud. More and more businesses place their infrastructure, data, and apps in the cloud, and rely on the high-level cloud capabilities provided by AWS for reliability, availability, and cost-efficiency. But they also rely on modern security solutions. The security risks companies face are multifaceted, and cyber-attacks are growing in frequency and complexity.

DevOps as a Culture for SecOps as well

With this shift in the market, Managed Service Providers (MSPs) have needed to shift as well. The service provided now addressed business efficiency, business expansion and growth, and not just saving costs and menial efforts. MSPs will continue to ensure that patch management and change management tools are in place, but they have to think bigger and be true partners to the entire business process of their customers.

In other words, Next-Gen MSPs need to be able to deliver higher-business value to their customers by supporting and creating fully automated IT environments to seamlessly integrate new infrastructure, software, and apps with almost no human involvement - the DevOps culture.

In the realm of cyber security, this means SecOps. For security in the cloud to be as agile as possible, companies should integrate their technology and business with automation and healthy inter-organizational communications. SecOps, as a methodology, addresses security considerations, from planning through development to delivery, automating security tasks while increasing accountability, visibility, and responsiveness.

Every business must address security, through policies, procedures, and practical steps. SecOps is the practical process whereby the security posture of your business is bolstered across the boards and becomes a shared responsibility. Automated processes which simplify and standardize security operations fused with tools such as APIs allow your developers and IT engineers to work collaboratively and rapidly. In essence, this enables CI/CD, without having to wait for your security team’s approval every step of the way. Of course, this notion of security built-in at every stage of the development cycle entails faster and more patching, thereby creating safer and more stable code.

In short, adopting SecOps as a model for your organization will improve your security posture and reduce the risks of a data breach while improving productivity and efficiency through advanced automation and shared responsibility.

SecOps as a Service

Adopting a culture is one thing, implementing it is another. With the growing number and types of threats, actually adopting the DevOps culture is not an easy task for any company. For instance, penetration testing and handling firewalls require different talents. Also, 24/7 monitoring means extra staff costs, who need to be trained in the appropriate technologies. Moreover, the ongoing learning required to keep up with the changes means additional personnel costs, and additional reimbursement, which will lead your costs to continually grow as the threats continue to loom.

SecOps as a Service, provided by Next Generation MSPs, enable your organization to achieve faster remediation and reduce risk with policies that are flexible and scalable. They provide visibility and create vulnerability management strategies in accordance with service level agreements (SLAs). With highly trained staff, they keep up to date on the latest developments. Next-Gen MSPs can afford to have on-staff experts from a wide variety of expertise, and because they monitor several clients simultaneously, they are host to Network Operations Centers (NOC) and Security Operation Centers (SOC) which protect their customers’ data and apps around the clock.

With security as a crucial element of well-architected cloud solutions, SecOps will utilize the most advanced and efficient tools the market has to offer, such as the AWS CloudFormation Templates. They will combine these tools with proper configuration, integration, and maintenance through which users can access your systems, such as AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Key Management Services (KMS) and AWS CloudTrail.

To summarize, the best way to stay secure in the cloud is to adopt the DevOps culture in this aspect as well. And a fully rounded Next-Gen MSP can provide you with SecOps suitable for your needs, to ensure your assets, apps, and infrastructure are properly protected.

‍Written by Dima Tatur, Head of Cyber Security Department at Commit