Security and DevSecOps

Security and DevSecOps is the work of placing security checks inside the software delivery path, from design through release, so that the people who ship code run the checks and the security team reviews the results. SEYA Group assesses how your applications, infrastructure, and data are protected today, then designs and, where agreed, builds the checks that make those controls real in the pipeline.

Who this is for

CIOs and CISOs whose controls exist in policy documents and audit spreadsheets but not in the systems that ship code. CTOs whose engineers treat security review as the gate at the end that delays every release. IT managers responsible for a cloud estate whose access, secrets, and image hygiene have grown without a plan. Architects designing a platform who want the controls designed in from the start.

Problems we solve

• An unclear split between what delivery teams own and what the security group owns.
• Container images that run in production without being scanned when they were built.
• Findings that appear in a penetration test or an audit, months after the code was written.
• Secrets kept in configuration files, chat messages, or a shared spreadsheet.
• Cloud account controls applied by hand, differently in each environment.

What you get

• Cloud security assessment. A review of how the in-scope applications, infrastructure, and data are protected, whether those controls show up in the lifecycle you already use, and a ranked list of recommended changes.
• DevSecOps review. A plain description of current delivery and security practices against a short set of working practices, written as a baseline your teams can share.
• Pipeline checks. Design and, where agreed, implementation of static analysis, dependency, image, and runtime scanning in the delivery pipeline, with rules that say which findings block a release.
• Container and secrets practices. How images are built, scanned, and admitted to each environment, and how secrets are stored, rotated, and reached by applications.
• Controls as code. A plan, and build where agreed, for writing infrastructure and security policy as code so the same review runs on every change.

How an engagement runs

• Scoping call. You describe the systems, the controls you are accountable for, and where the friction between security and delivery sits today.
• Assessment. We review the environment, the pipeline, and the current practices with security and engineering together and write up findings and recommendations.
• Design. Checks, admission rules, and ownership are agreed with both groups, including what blocks a release and who decides exceptions.
• Build with your teams. Checks go into the pipeline one stage at a time, tuned with your engineers so that findings are real and the pipeline stays usable.
• Handover. Your teams own the checks, the rules, and the policy code, with the review repeated later if you want a second baseline.

Technical scope

Work covers AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud account and identity controls, with infrastructure and policy written in Terraform where your team uses it. SEYA has implemented secrets management with HashiCorp Vault and AWS Secrets Manager, service discovery with HashiCorp Consul, and pipeline controls in Jenkins and GitHub Actions. Container scanning and admission rules are designed for Kubernetes platforms including Amazon EKS, Google Kubernetes Engine, and OpenShift. Where you are preparing an environment for a standard such as PCI DSS or SOC 2, the assessment maps the controls you need to the checks the pipeline can run; the certification itself is between you and your assessor.

What you need in place

A security owner and an engineering owner who will both take part, access to the pipeline and cloud accounts in scope, and agreement that findings will be written down honestly. If the pipeline itself does not exist yet, that is built under enterprise transformation or cloud-native development, and the checks are designed alongside it. If the cloud foundation is still being built, the landing-zone controls belong to cloud platform and migration and this work extends them.

Out of scope here: a security operations centre or monitoring service, a certification against a named regulation, and a guarantee that a system is safe. Findings are what the checks report, and a clean result means those checks passed.

Related work

• Clearly: secrets management with HashiCorp Vault and AWS Secrets Manager inside a pipeline-as-code AWS environment

Questions buyers ask

Will this slow our releases down?

The design goal is the reverse. Checks run early, where fixing is cheap, and the blocking rules are agreed with engineering so that a red pipeline means something real. We tune the checks with your team before they become gates.

Who decides what blocks a release?

Your security and engineering owners, together, in the design stage. SEYA recommends; the rules are yours, and so is the exception process.

Can you help us get ready for an audit?

Yes, in the sense of mapping the controls you need to the checks the pipeline can run and showing where the evidence will come from. The audit and any certificate remain between you and your assessor.

How do you work with our security team?

As colleagues. Security stays the reviewer of results and owner of policy; the work moves the running of checks to the teams that ship code.

If your controls live in documents and your releases live somewhere else, book a security assessment call and we will tell you what the first review would cover.