2020 saw rapid adoption of DevOps tools and practices. Automation and containerization became and continue to be critical for agility, repeatability and scale. As companies look towards 2021, security will be a major focus. Fear of security breaches and potential loss of customer trust will drive security best practices. This shift will take place earlier in the development process and we will see a larger focus on DevSecOps, meaning security will become a first class citizen as part of the software development life cycle (SDLC). Companies that can achieve “zero touch deploy” across infrastructure, software and security will have a significant advantage over their competitors.

The impact of this change will streamline the SDLC as trusted digital certificates, code signing and identity management policies and processes will be fully automated. This will speed up innovation and time to market while reducing security related outages and breaches.

The impact of this change will require companies to tighten their security practices and policies. This will include cryptology training, awareness and new tooling for better discovery, risk assessment and risk remediation. DevOps and security teams will have to work closely together to automate certificate deployments, code signing and identity management to ensure repeatability and auditability.