Shifting Security Left with Platform Engineering

You may have heard people say DevOps is “dead” now that platform engineering is becoming widely adopted across software engineering teams.

However, it is more accurate to say DevOps has evolved and matured into platform engineering, which is “the discipline of designing and building toolchains and workflows that enable self-service capabilities for software engineering organizations,” according to platformengineering.org.

Platform engineering incorporates many of the DevOps methodology’s strongpoints, such as baking security into every step rather than waiting to address security at the end of the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC) which causes rework, confusion and delays delivery.

Shifting security left is a DevOps strategy that involves incorporating security testing and assurance processes as early as possible in the SDLC. Platform engineering makes it even easier to shift security to the left through automation, templates and preconfigured pipelines, removing much of the tedious work from the responsibility of developers.

By creating a single, unified platform that consolidates tools and processes developers rely on, platform engineering helps eliminate team silos and tool fragmentation. Developers no longer need to figure out what tools to use because through the platform’s controlled environment, the proper tools are built into workflows, enabling seamless, secure and efficient development.

Platform engineering allows policies and regulations to be embedded into templated development and deployment processes. This ensures developers adhere to internal standards, best practices and compliance guidelines without having to decide when or how to apply each rule and policy. 

To further strengthen security, you can build in automation tools to conduct code security, integration and unit tests, along with continuous monitoring and audits, to ensure regulatory compliance through the development process. By embedding analysis tools into pipelines throughout the SDLC, you put security at the forefront and minimize human error at every stage, from development to deployment. 

By funneling all development through code and pipelines, actions and changes are recorded, creating audit trails to maintain accountability, improve traceability and demonstrate adherence to regulations  with the added capability of automatically generated comprehensive compliance reports.

Role-based access controls can be implemented to customize access to sensitive data and systems based on a user’s specific role, which helps protect against breaches and accidental access. For more protection, you can encrypt data to keep sensitive information confidential and enable tools to improve data governance and integrity, and the overall quality of your final product.

A platform approach can also boost your ability to handle security incidents by automatically detecting, investigating, responding to and alerting your team about potential issues. This real-time monitoring can help minimize risk and better pinpoint the root cause of an incident.

For platform engineering to be successful, it is important to treat the platform itself as a software artifact. Having a platform engineering team (can range in size depending on your organization) with a member dedicated to security will ensure your platform is enabling developers to build, test and deploy applications with minimal hurdles while maintaining consistency to a wide range of policies and standards.

Overall, ensuring your applications are innately secure is just one benefit of platform engineering. Other capabilities include automation infrastructure as code (IaC), continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), containerization, hybrid and multicloud application management, improved DevOps enablement and more.