Companies have had IT operations and security teams for a long. They both have different responsibilities and tools to work with. However, times have changed, and security concerns are increasing for organisations. Recent cyberattacks have denoted how clever these new-age hackers are. They quickly find loopholes within the system and exploit them for personal gain. Since security and operations teams work separately, they often end up contradicting each other. Even the root cause for a simple attack cannot be determined quickly. To boost service availability and security, organisations are bound to bring both teams together with the help of AIOps platforms. Read on to understand how SecOps can bridge the gap between security and operations.

Why is it hard to bridge the gap between security and operations?

If it were easy, every enterprise must have adopted SecOps processes. There are several dissimilarities between the tools and technologies used by security and operations teams. Enterprises must understand the basic differences between security and operations teams. Only then enterprises can know what to fix with SecOps processes. The people, tools, and culture of security and operations differ significantly. Let us discuss these three points to understand what to expect with SecOps:

Difference between security and operations professionals

IT operations professionals are responsible for providing IT support, analyzing human resources, updating processes, and more. They are highly trained and responsible for keeping the business up and running at all times. They focus on service availability at all times. If any performance or security issues are observed, they notify the security department.

Security professionals are skilled and have training in software testing and patching. They receive incident reports from the employees, operations teams, and customers. Once a major issue is observed, security professionals try to eliminate it as soon as possible. By doing so, security professionals allow the business to operate without any vulnerabilities. At prima facie, the responsibilities of security and operations might seem entirely different.

Even though both departments seem distinct, there is a lot in common. A security expert cannot understand the vulnerabilities without knowing how the application is developed or used. On the other hand, operations experts cannot understand the cause of software downtime without a security expert. To have a complete understanding of the common security threats, both teams must come together. Many IT experts have made transitions to security experts in their careers. There is much common between operations and security professionals, as it seems.

Difference between tools used by operations and security teams

The tools used by security and operations teams differ completely. However, an integration of both types of tools can lead to improved service availability. Security teams use tools that can identify the vulnerabilities in any particular system or network. Mostly, security teams depend on monitoring tools. These tools monitor the system performance at all times and notify whenever a security breach happens. Security teams also count on tools that collect telemetry data from different software products.

Operations teams rely on tools that help throughout the lifecycle of an application or software system. They also rely on staging and testing tools to improve the software during its development. Operations teams also rely on automation pipelines to deploy new products quickly. Sometimes, operations teams might overlook the security factor when pushing new products into deployment. Infrastructure-as-code tools are also used by operations people to create suitable environments for hosting applications. They also use monitoring tools at times to know about the application performance standards.

SecOps will bridge the gap between the tools used by operations and security teams. The tools will be integrated to boost the service reliability easily. For example, monitoring tools used by operations and security teams can be integrated. It will increase the visibility into the software systems starting from the development part. Security and performance monitoring are two sides of the same coin. In most cases, a security concern is the cause of the underperformance of an application. Integrating tools will boost collaboration, which is the key to SecOps’ success.

Difference between the culture of security and operations

The differences aren’t only observed in the tools and processes of operations and security teams. SecOps also aims at bridging the culture of security and operations teams. When we consider security teams, they are always concerned about the vulnerabilities of the system. They know when software products are more, the security risks are also high. They know that frequent updates must be delivered to ensure the service reliability of different software products.

On the other hand, operations teams aren’t everything about security. They are more focused on the speed and scalability of software products. They want results faster and use automation pipelines to deliver products quickly. Security is also a concern for operations teams, but it does not come at the cost of speed and flexibility.

SecOps aims at bringing the culture of operations and security teams together. Security teams must embrace innovation and speed considering the competitive era. On the other hand, operations teams must also realise that security is important for every software product.

How is AIOps the right choice for bridging the gap between both teams?

As discussed above, there are some dissimilarities between the security and operations teams. However, it can be bridged by using the right tool for SecOps. An AIOps based analytics platform would be the ideal choice for implementing SecOps. An AIOps based analytics platform is better at application performance monitoring, root cause analysis, event correlation, incident prioritisation, and many other tasks. Both operations and security teams can use the AIOps-led solution for their work. When both teams start using the same tool, the culture will merge sooner. AIOps is also helpful in automating security and operations processes with a minimal human touch.

Conclusion

SecOps empowered by AIOps platforms is the need of the hour if enterprises want to cope with the rising cybersecurity challenges. Security must be embedded into products while they are being produced. Security cannot be an afterthought when cybersecurity risks are in their prime. Enterprises must have a pre-defined SecOps strategy to merge the gap between security and operations teams. Draft a SecOps strategy now for better results!