As technology continues to evolve, the roles of software engineers and DevOps teams continue to expand. Historically, it was perfectly fine for software engineers to ignore compliance. This is certainly not the case today as apps, tools and software need to be compliant with multiple standards from the onset. The following explores why DevOps should incorporate security compliance into the software development life cycle (SDLC) and leverage the power of integrating project management tools with a GRC platform.
Why DevOps and Software Engineer Teams Need to Worry About Compliance
In today’s rapidly advancing business world, the role of DevOps in achieving success cannot be ignored. As businesses continue to adopt DevOps, the need to work closely with compliance continues to rise.
The need to remain compliant with data management has never been more urgent than it is today. Although remaining compliant with data has always been a major headache in IT, the vast amount of standards and regulations that businesses must comply with nowadays is certainly new. As a result, Software engineers need to factor in these standards as they innovate or create solutions.
In addition, the rise of third-party vendor integrations is also a key reason why DevOps and software engineering teams should worry about compliance. In 2017, 63% of all data breaches originated as breaches with third-party vendors. Managing vendor compliance, as well as privacy regulations, is another major reason why DevOps and software engineering teams should worry about compliance.
Security Risks of Not Managing Compliance for a DevOps Team
By failing to manage compliance in your DevOps software engineering team, you’d be exposing your business to many adverse risks. The following are some of the key risks associated with failing to manage compliance in your DevOps software engineer team.
Building non-compliant solutions
With so many data compliance and regulatory standards that organizations need to meet in today’s rapidly advancing digital world, building apps or software solutions that are not compliant is a risk that’s not worth taking.
Internal data breaches
Not all cyber breaches are external: as a result of negligence, internal breaches can occur. Managing compliance on a DevOps team helps to minimize this risk. For instance, rather than offering every software engineer access to all digital assets in a company, the compliance team can help ensure that they only have access to what they need.
External data breaches
When software solutions are built with vulnerabilities, they could potentially lead to critical cybersecurity breaches. However, when compliance is taken into consideration, testing could be done at every stage of the SDLC, reducing the likelihood of having known vulnerabilities in the solution.
Slow paced delivery
This can be in terms of the time it takes for software engineers to go back and forth in debugging faulty code or the absence of automation. Compliance is pro-automation since this brings consistency and reduces potential errors.
The Importance of Tracking Tasks & Requests
Compliance standards affect every part of an organization so it’s essential that the culture extends to all these parts including software development. In software development, compliance cuts through every stage from ideation to implementation, creating a need for transparency when managing tasks and requests of software engineer teams.
The following are highlights of the importance of tracking tasks and requests of software engineer teams to compliance.
- Include compliance at every stage of the SDLC.
- Improved software engineering quality.
- Reduced cost of development.
- Proactively detect security flaws and code weakness.
- Manage who has access to which intellectual property or digital asset rather than giving all developers blanket access.
How To Integrate Compliance & Software Engineer Teams
The speed of business today means that compliance and software engineer teams can no longer operate separately. An organization’s compliance strategy must be built-in from the foundation up. As a result, software engineers understand this from ideation and development to software implementation and at every stage of the SDLC.
The following explores how businesses can integrate their compliance strategy into their software engineering teams.
- Educate Software engineering team
- Include compliance objectives in your DevOps strategy
- Monitor, test for flaws, and detect or prevent vulnerabilities and attacks.
- Automate audit trail and workflow.
Why Is Jira Important To Compliance Teams?
Jira is an issue tracking and project management tool that works seamlessly with any agile methodology like Scrum or Kanban. Jira allows you to plan, track and manage all your projects from one simple tool or dashboard. This tool is widely popular for its flexibility and ability to flawlessly combine with a wide range of programs.
Jira allows teams to manage issues related to a wide range of projects from one page. Whether you’re a massive firm or small business, Jira essentially helps you create accurate workflow tracking for documentation or auditing.
In addition, one of the main reasons why Jira is important to DevOps teams is its customizability. From the simplest task to the most complex project, Jira allows teams to easily adapt and scale adjustments as required. Apart from tracking and managing issues, Jira allows your DevOps team to easily designate roles and permissions to different team members.
Benefits of integrating with GRC with Jira
The following are some of the ways in which integrating your GRC solution with Jira can help improve your business.
Task syncing with development teams: When you integrate your GRC software with Jira, you can effectively sync compliance tasks with development teams. Task syncing will consequently give you an overview of development tasks and what stage of development they are in. This is very important as tracking these tasks on Jira is essential for risk mitigation. Task syncing on Jira will allow you to do the following:
- Overview journey of tasks in development.
- Risk mitigation
- Code update to support new encryption
- Implement end to end encryption
Creating integrations is a time saving business improvement: By integrating software tools like Jira, you’d be saving valuable business time and simplifying your decision-making process. It also increases your productivity and improves visibility by allowing you to view all relevant data via one dashboard.
GRC software should integrate with Jira: With more than 1000 readily available APIs and add-ons, Jira is widely accepted as one of the leading ticketing systems and project management tools available. On the other hand, GRC software aims to help you organize IT compliance management processes and risk management solutions.
Jira is highly customizable and can be incorporated into multiple areas of your business. By integrating Jira into your GRC solution, you’ll benefit from numerous add-ons and automation capabilities it offers.
StandardFusion GRC Software seamlessly integrates with Jira
By leveraging your existing information and tools, you’d be empowering your teams to stay on track when you integrate Jira into your GRC solution. StandardFusion and Jira work seamlessly together to allow you to bring relevant information to your compliance and DevOps without any confusing crossover
StandardFusion understands the importance of having a holistic view. Whether you’re on the Information Security, Internal Audit, Vendor Assessment or Risk Management team StandardFusion looks to integrate with the tools you are already using to compile your critical data in one place.
Closing Thoughts
With data laws set to be updated for the digital age, the time is certainly right for DevOps and software engineering teams to become more focused on compliance. There are many who still believe that compliance can be a stumbling block for software engineers and that they should be separate. When executed properly, DevOps can help automate compliance and reduce headaches. StandardFusion integrates Jira into its GRC software for effective project management and holistic view of your compliance efforts. Request a demo today to see how GRC and Jira make compliance approachable for your DevOps team.
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