JFrog’s Unified DevSecOps Platform: Elevating Security in DevOps Processes

In the ever-evolving landscape of technology, the integration of security into DevOps practices has become paramount for organizations aiming to ensure the stability, reliability, and confidence of their business applications. CXOToday delves into JFrog’s perspective on this crucial integration, emphasizing its role in fortifying the software supply chain. JFrog, with its unified platform, not only automates security checks and compliance tasks but also fosters collaboration between development and security teams. This comprehensive Q&A session with Kavita Viswanath, GM & VP APAC, JFrog, explores the specific features of JFrog’s products, recommendations for a shift-left security approach, and emerging trends in the integration of security into DevOps processes. Additionally, as AI-based applications surge in popularity, the discussion extends to how organizations can securely manage and deploy machine learning models within the broader context of software development practices.

1. What is JFrog’s perspective on the integration of security into DevOps processes?

Security is a must-have component of the DevOps process as it impacts the stability, reliability, and confidence of end users when using the organization’s business applications. With natively integrated security into a software supply chain platform, organizations can proactively address potential security risks and ensure that application security is infused throughout the entire software development life cycle (SDLC).

Unlike siloed security tools, a unified platform provides complete visibility and context across the SDLC, eliminating blind spots. Continuous security scanning fortifies the software supply chain, blocks risks, and accelerates remediation efforts.

2. How does integrating security into DevOps benefit organizations in terms of agility and overall risk management?

Integrated security throughout the software supply chain leads to more consistent security policies and better overall risk management.

1. 1. Faster development cycles by automating security checks and accelerating releases without compromising security measures or trust.
   2. Visibility across software development processes with automated policies that proactively block vulnerabilities, risks, and malicious packages and provide easy-to-follow remediation. recommendations.
   3. Regulatory compliance and meeting industry standards.

3. What role do JFrog products play in automating security checks and compliance within the DevOps pipeline?

JFrog includes automated security checks throughout the SDLC. With JFrog Curation and Catalog, checking for vulnerabilities starts earlier than Git repositories, and right through to runtime. With JFrog, organizations can build governance into their workflows to automate regulatory and compliance tasks with tracking, evidence capture, and provenance data required for advanced SBOM generation and compliance reports at the click of a button.

JFrog is the single source of truth for a trusted DevOps pipeline and practice. Since everything flows through JFrog’s platform, it enables organizations to implement automated quality controls while providing a clear picture of the status of all releases and pipeline performance. JFrog is the system of record for build, promotion, and release processes, providing consistency and assured quality. It also facilitates expedited remediation efforts when needed. The Platform provides an easy way to view the status of build pipelines, release bundles, and what is in production. JFrog’s unified software supply chain platform facilitates easy auditing for any compliance needs.

4. What specific features or tools does JFrog provide to enhance container security in DevOps processes?

JFrog’s Advanced Security capabilities extend the security and compliance capabilities of the platform into containerized applications and include the ability to find, fix, and fortify against open source vulnerabilities (and their dependencies) in all layers, detect exposed secrets, misconfigured OSS libraries and micro-services, Infrastructure-as-code malpractices, as well as identify false positives in container images.

Container security must shift left and right to protect environments across the entire software development life cycle. JFrog Xray scans all the layers in a container, validating all of the information from the manifest.json file located in JFrog Artifactory. Following this scan, organizations get a list of all security and compliance violations found in the Docker images.

Since JFrog Xray shows all the Docker images containing infected artifacts, organizations can instantly understand the impact a vulnerability has on all Docker images in their system. For example, when analyzing a Docker image, if JFrog Xray finds a vulnerable component, the Platform already knows which builds also include that same vulnerable component, speeding remediation efforts and saving time and money.

5. What recommendations do you have for organizations looking to adopt a shift-left security approach using JFrog solutions?

Shift-left security enables early detection during coding that catches vulnerabilities before they propagate through the pipeline, reducing costs and efforts of fixing and rewriting code later.
In practical terms, shifting security left means following best practices such as:

• Scanning of developer dependency downloads into the development environment also known as curation of OSS packages
• Integrating source code scanning into the integrated development environments (IDEs) for vulnerable coding and data flows
• Integrating open-source security scanning into IDE and Git repositories
• Automating security-related tests for developers using a command line tool and APIs
• Educating all team members on security principles and coding practices
• Implementing change management and compliance monitoring processesJFrog Curation takes the shift left concept to the next level by automatically blocking malicious or risky open-source software packages before entry to an organization, drastically reducing a company’s overall attack surface and hence risk without compromising on speed or the developer experience.

  Organizations can leverage JFrog’s platform to automatically protect applications at each stage of the life cycle, ensuring that DevOps teams can detect as many risks as possible, as early as possible.

6. How does JFrog facilitate collaboration between development and security teams throughout the software development lifecycle?

As a unified DevSecOps platform with a single source of truth and shared context, it is easy to apply consistent policies across the entire software development lifecycle. Shared data and context enable developers and security teams to work in a unified manner in the same platform. Policies can send notifications across teams to facilitate cross-department coordination and collaboration efforts on the identification and remediation of vulnerabilities.

As part of the platform, JFrog security solutions are easy to integrate, reducing friction across the SDLC ecosystem and internally among development and security teams. With automated processes alongside cross-platform context, JFrog eliminates any friction between R&D, DevOps, and Security, enabling these teams to easily communicate. In addition, with JFrog, it becomes easy to identify the source and owner of vulnerable packages, reducing the window of exposure, and mitigating risk faster.

7. What do you see as emerging trends in the integration of security into DevOps practices?

Looking ahead, the synergy between DevSecOps and DevOps is poised to take center stage in the ever-evolving tech landscape. The conventional separation of security as a distinct consideration is giving way to a more integrated approach within the development and deployment pipeline. Standard practices are shifting towards continuous security testing, comprehensive vulnerability scanning, and rigorous code analysis, reflecting a proactive commitment to prioritizing security throughout the developmental lifecycle. This integration is particularly vital as organizations increasingly adopt a platform approach to consolidate tools for end-to-end security in their software supply chain. The trend of tool consolidation becomes more pronounced as siloed best-of-breed security tools prove unwieldy and challenging to harmonize across the SDLC. As supply chain attacks rise, the necessity for integrated security processes across the SDLC becomes imperative.

On the horizon of technological evolution, the widespread adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid environments is becoming the new norm. As organizations traverse this dynamic terrain, DevOps processes are evolving to adeptly navigate the complexities of managing applications and infrastructure across diverse cloud platforms and on-premises environments. This strategic adaptation is pivotal in ensuring a resilient and secure technological infrastructure, aligning seamlessly with the future demands of the industry.

• AI-based applications are increasing and need to be managed and deployed securely like any other type of software. The Global ML market size is expected to grow from $26.03B in 2023 to $225.91B by 2030. As a result, DevOps and security teams are expected to cater to their organizations’ MLOps needs. ML model development is relatively new, lacking transparency into and integration with broader software development practices.Organizations will seek a single system of record for ML models that aligns ML/AI development with their SDLC, allowing them to apply the same best practices used for package management to model management. A true Software Supply Chain platform enables maximizing AI/ML benefits and handling large binary files while eliminating related risks.