Understanding DevOps, SecOps, and DevSecOps: Definitions, Benefits, and Choosing the Right Approach

As the tech industry adopts various philosophies and methodologies, it can be confusing to understand what each term encompasses. If you are more interested in cultural shifts such as DevOps, even these approaches have many definitions, and deeper concepts like SecOps and DevSecOps can puzzle even experienced team members.

We have compiled a comprehensive guide to define the differences between SecOps and DevSecOps and how they can benefit your organization.

What is DevOps?

First, before comparing the other two aspects, it is necessary to understand the concept of DevOps. Although definitions vary widely, the core of DevOps is the combination of tools, practices, and ideas that improve an organization’s ability to deliver services and applications rapidly.

In the past, IT Operations (ITOps) had to manually build infrastructure, taking days or weeks to test and deploy code. With DevOps, the entire process is automated. By integrating development and ITOps teams, DevOps enhances and streamlines the software development workflow, allowing faster development and deployment of applications.

Benefits of adopting DevOps include:

Improved collaboration

Faster time‑to‑market through innovation

Enhanced problem‑solving capability

More time for innovation

Higher return on investment

What is SecOps?

SecOps is an approach that aims to automate security tasks by combining security teams with ITOps teams, injecting security throughout the product lifecycle.

Like DevOps, SecOps is a philosophy that encourages higher‑level collaboration among designers, programmers, and security personnel. The team can consider security threats across the entire development cycle and how they affect software and its users.

The main distinction between SecOps and other development philosophies such as DevOps or Agile is that SecOps focuses on ensuring every member of the development‑cycle team understands and is responsible for security.

A key benefit of SecOps is that it enables security teams to scale, delegate responsibilities, and continuously “mitigate” risks, working closely with most team members, especially those involved in development.

Additional benefits for enterprises include:

Increased productivity

Improved resource utilization

Higher return on investment

Fewer application interruptions

Reduced cloud security threats

More effective audit processes

What is DevSecOps?

In short, DevSecOps is the integration of DevOps and SecOps. Like DevOps, it enhances outcomes through collaboration and communication, and it promotes building security into applications throughout the development process.

With DevSecOps, developers run tests during coding, then additional security tests before deploying to production. If any test fails, the code is returned to developers for fixing before reaching production, dramatically lowering the risk of deploying vulnerable software.

By detecting vulnerabilities early, DevSecOps greatly improves security, automates code checks, and propagates secure design patterns and principles among developers, adding value while reducing costs.

The improved automation across the software delivery pipeline reduces downtime and attacks, and eliminates errors. Other advantages of DevSecOps include:

Stronger collaboration and communication between teams

Higher agility and speed for security teams

Early detection and mitigation of code vulnerabilities

Improved rapid change capability

Increased opportunities for quality‑assurance testing

SecOps or DevSecOps: Which to Choose?

Ultimately, SecOps and DevSecOps are very similar philosophies. The key difference is that SecOps focuses more on the integration of security and operations teams, while DevSecOps brings development teams into support of security and ITOps.

The most important takeaway is that they share an agile nature and collaborative components. By breaking down silos, combining automation, agility, shared responsibility, and communication, security is injected throughout. Given the rising risks organizations face in 2020 and beyond, incorporating security into any process is essential, and automated workflows ensure maximum benefit and safety.