Secure Deployment
Software development teams require secure processes for deploying code changes and managing infrastructure to protect software systems from security threats. Secure deployment encompasses a wide range of topics, including authentication, vulnerability scanning, encryption, configuration management, and networking.
This guide provides a high-level overview of the most important secure deployment practices we follow here at Socotra, and we highly recommend our customers follow these same guidelines.
Automation
- Automate code deployments using CI/CD tools like GitHub or Jenkins.
- Automate infrastructure deployments using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation.
- Automate vulnerability scanning in build pipelines, including DAST, SAST, IAST, and SCA scans. Automatically block deployments if vulnerabilities are detected.
Authentication
- Require authentication and authorization to access your application code, infrastructure, and CI/CD tools.
- Enforce password best practices.
- Enforce the principle of least privilege .
- Implement Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).
- Store credentials, API keys, and encryption keys within a secure secrets management system like HashiCorp Vault or AWS Secrets Manager. Never store credentials in your GitHub repositories.
Administration
- Identify and uphold security standards relevant to your organization.
- Establish a Secure Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
- Perform continuous security testing using penetration testing, threat detection, threat modeling, IDS, IPS, and SIEM tools.
- Review deployment configurations on a regular basis.
Development
- Implement secure development best practices.
- Maintain separate development, QA, UAT, and production environments.
- Implement network security safeguards like firewalls, rate limiting, and DDoS protection.
- Implement encryption best practices.
- Implement cloud security best practices for your cloud platform.
- Maintain a monitoring and alerting system using tools like Grafana and our audit log.