Software development has continuously evolved over the past years, with DevOps developmental process increasing in adoption, it is no surprise that integrating automation into DevOps cycles to maximize efficiency is the foremost goal of many development teams. Unlike other models, the DevOps environment delivery process relies on being continuous. Instead of releasing application updates in set intervals, often on a monthly basis, the flexibility of DevOps teams means that changes can be made daily, or sometimes even quicker. The overall benefit being that the customer is being offered the best experience in terms of continuous updates due to the fluidity of the development channels.
In the 2023 State of DevOps Report, results suggest a continuing trend of DevOps evolving within organizations, with an increasing number of organizations identifying as “highly evolved” in DevOps practices, while the amount that identify themselves as at the beginning of their DevOps journey is steadily shrinking. As organizations continue to develop their DevOps practices, there comes an increasing need to manage more complex pipelines and processes, and with the efficiency of automated pipelines now being a near necessity, it’s more critical than ever to ensure the security of the sensitive data being handled by automated systems.
Securing DevOps Pipelines with PKI
The biggest challenge facing DevOps teams is how to manage the sheer volume of containers and microservices that are active in the development pipeline, thus managing a growing number of digital certificates in place to secure these. Manually requesting certificates from a Certificate Authority (CA) is old-hat by modern standards, and the focus is increasingly brought on how to automate the certificate management in the most efficient way possible. The biggest problem is doing this in a way that is not only fast, but secure. Companies may try to save time or money through using unsecure practices such as the use of self-signed certificates to manage their pipelines, and in doing so put their organization at risk. Instead, companies need a way of meeting the efficiency of automated certificate management with the security of globally trusted CAs.
GlobalSign’s Atlas platform integrations for DevOps are built to scale and can manage large volumes of PKI certificates. Able to automate the procurement and installation of trusted digital certificates within CI/CD pipelines and applications to relieve IT and development teams from the burden of manual management. More essentially, it offers a fundamental focus on security with secure signed certificates for peace of mind.
The Benefits of a Secure CI/CD Pipeline
Using a CI/CD pipeline is a modern necessity for developmental teams utilizing DevOps workflows. Automating the process of obtaining digital certificates to secure your pipeline offers many benefits to businesses:
- Reliability: Excluding the need for human intervention with release flows and the automation of verification stages means perfect consistency across the board.
- Flexibility: Being able to continuously push out small updates and pieces of work and having a process in place which secures each stage of development means that teams can focus on important issues as they arise.
- Efficiency: A completely automated process to managing PKI means that QA teams won’t struggle to manage frequent releases.
- Security: Embracing automated PKI management means protection from human-error, and with secure certificates protecting your data, it means that you’re less vulnerable to a breach than with standard practices.
- Visibility: Complete control and clear visibility over your certificate portfolio enablesd effective certificate lifecycle management.
Seamless Integrations: Securely Integrated PKI for DevOps
GlobalSign continues to develop new integrations and features or its DevOps integration to work alongside developers to help ensure their rapidly evolving applications are secure, including integration with services like Kubernetes cert-manager and HashiCorp Vault. Utilizing Atlas, the automation capabilities and APIs make it easy to embed certificates for any DevOps team at any phase of the CI/CD pipeline.
HashiCorp Vault is an identity-based security solution that leverages trusted sources of identity to keep secrets and application data secure. In this case, a secret is anything that you want to tightly control access to, such as API keys, passwords, or certificates.
This integration allows users to issue certificates, list and revoke them. In addition, Vault guarantees encryption to the end-user along with access management and audit trails.
Utilizing Atlas Integrations for DevOps
Utilizing automated systems and integrations in your DevOps environment has become a necessity with the volume of certificates that exist in a modern development workflow. Utilizing GlobalSign’s Atlas integration with Hashicorp Vault ensures a secure environment for you to build and deploy with confidence that you are shipping the best product for your end users, all while protecting your business.
Increasing performance, reducing costs, and building better software that has fewer failures is something all IT teams should be looking to achieve. With a secure DevOps approach, this is more than reachable.
