Value Stream Management Platform for DevSecOps From Kovair
By Akshay Sharma – CTO, Kovair Software, Inc. & Amit Dasgupta, Director Major Accounts & Partnerships, Kovair Software Inc.
Introduction to VSMP for DevSecOps
Kovair, with its ecosystem partners, is building and enabling an end-to-end DevSecOps VSMP: Value Stream Management Platform applicable to all stakeholders across the enterprise — from CIOs/CTO, to CISOs, portfolio managers, program managers, release managers and team members. It provides a holistic approach to application development and delivery by applying the principles of DevSecOps leveraging any development methodology, preferably Agile.
What is the problem?
According to Gartner, DevSecOps Shift-Left Testing allows for security vulnerabilities to be detected earlier in the process, which Kovair supports, via it’s own IDE Security Plug-ins to leading ecosystem partners, and integrations as follows:
The DevSecOps Toolchain:
Source: Gartner: Integrating Security Into the DevSecOps Toolchain, 15 November 2019 – ID G00377293
These pipelines are designed to meet the unique needs of implementing continuous delivery, helping enterprises to manage applications, deployed in heterogeneous environments like on-premise or cloud, as well within legacy applications lifecycle management (ALM) to DevSecOps solutions delivery.
According to leading analyst firms, the best security practice would be to have developers reduce the attack surface in their applications as they design, code, and test. “Today’s reality is that developers don’t code securely. When measured against major industry vulnerability standards, 70 percent of applications fail security testing on the first scan.”
– Source: SD Times: For effective DevSecOps, shift left AND extend right – SD Times
– Source: SD Times: For effective DevSecOps, shift left AND extend right – SD Times
According to the SD Times, enterprise leaders should uncover newer unique capabilities in DevOps value stream management platforms, like Kovair’s solution:
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To:
- Provide end-to-end visibility and insight into their product delivery.
- Assess the performance, quality and value of their products, including development costs and ROI.
- Evaluate the maturity of their existing product delivery capabilities and identify constraints to flow and gaps in insights for stakeholders.
- Provide customized dashboards and views of product delivery for other stakeholders and leadership.
- Gain a consolidated view of governance, security and compliance across all product lines.
- Leverage advanced capabilities, such as change risk analytics, to make more informed decisions about releasing new features.
Applications Security
Security is a multi-faceted topic with holistic thinking needed such as data-at-rest encryption, boot time integrity checks, identity management, to SaaS-based orchestration platforms, with Zero trust network access (ZTNA), to data-in-motion security solutions, as people and devices move in 3G/4G/5G and other access methods like WiFi.
Kovair is partnering with leading solutions providers to offer a VSMP for DevSecOps solution. -should some partners be mentioned?
Today, many cloud-connected applications are being proposed provided by one or more of the hyperscale cloud providers, with siloed, proprietary solutions by the cloud provider. The Linux Foundation’s LF Edge, has proposed frameworks and technologies being standardized using open-source solutions such as containers, Kubernetes and control planes offered from a centralized core or SaaS implementation. Gartner expects the popularity of implementations based on open-source frameworks and tools to rise rapidly given the maturing feature sets and desire for cloud independence. Yet these need a VSMP toolset for management, policy-control, and governance of the applications.
Some of the major benefits of Kovair’s Value Stream Management toolset for DevSecOps for different stakeholders are:
- Increased management visibility in the areas of Program & Project Health & Resource Utilization
- Better alignment of project delivery teams with business strategy
- Real-time visibility of ROI for C-Level executives
- Identification, improvement and standardization of working processes
- Compatible data and measurements across tools
- Increased collaboration and knowledge sharing
- Decreased deployment delays, inefficiencies and errors
What would Kovair Recommend? *
- Have a business continuity plan.
- Evaluate your IT disaster recovery and service continuity: 5G Edge Computing may be a solution.
- Are geo-diverse, hybrid multi-clouds in use, and in sync?
- Are IT service management (ITSM) tools for IT asset management (ITAM) and IT recovery orchestration tools in place?
- Is Crisis/emergency management in place?
- Are workflows automated, and if so can manual fallback procedures take over?
- Are the networks resilient with hitless failover to diverse networks in place?
- Are databases and applications resilient with hitless failover to backup server farms?
- Ensure Holistic version control of networks/applications, keep computer operating systems/software patched.
- Network Configuration Management with DevOps Applications Source Code Management, with version audits to ensure compliance.
- Ensure Network Policy Compliance with Electronic Data Record Compliance, and Workflow/Process Compliance
- Practice Safe Computing:
- Protecting Data
- Practicing Safe Remote and Mobile Computing
- Protecting Physical Security
- Establish a Chief Security Officer, with Board-level reporting, ensure security reporting through regular audits.
- Anomaly detection should be running constantly to detect threats as they emerge, look to Behavioral Analytics solutions
- Penetration testing shows if systems can easily be reached from the outside. Explore all applications, APIs, and software middleware bus solutions and ensure policy controls, and encryption is in place.
- Explore micro-segmentation and granular perimeter enforcement based on users, their locations and other data to determine whether to trust a user, machine or application seeking access to a particular part of the enterprise.
- Explore Next Generation Web Application Firewall (NGWAF), Encryption, VPN’s
* The author has previously provided a very similar list of recommendations to Rich Tehrani, CEO of IT Expo in 2019.
Kovair-The True Value Stream Management Platform for DevSecOps
Kovair with its suite of products offers a complete Value Stream Management Platform – VSMP for DevOps and now DevSecOps
Kovair’s VSMP Toolchain addresses the need for unified visibility, orchestration, integration, governance and management of the ALM and DevOps value stream, and now added Security Vulnerability Assessments are included with operational management dashboards for ISO Security and Risk Management. Kovair’s VSMP for DevSecOps solution improves flow and traceability, with process compliance, and end-to-end product lifecycle management, needed for 5G Edge Computing services.
Kovair DevSecOps
Kovair DevSecOps bridges the gap between Operations and Internal engineering teams with dashboards for process compliance, while automating the entire process from code testing, security vulnerability assessment, to deployment through a concurrent task-based CI/CD pipeline, and operational monitoring in the field. It provides a real-time insight to improve delivery velocity, helps identify and eliminate bottlenecks, and delivers with lower deployment costs. It enables DevSecOps over a Concurrent Multimodal Development Environment. Kovair allows the choice of their best of breed tools, with legacy ALM and newer Agile, DevSecOps security supported with tools like Veracode & AppScan.
Kovair Omnibus
Kovair’s Gartner Cool Vendor award-winning proprietary ESB, Kovair Omnibus has been newly launched as Kovair Enterprise iPaaS with cloud-based support, which enables Hybrid Multi-cloud solutions, with Industry4.0 iPaaS: integration Platform as a Service. This is a platform-centric approach connecting both ALM and DevSecOps toolchains across heterogenous environments that support end-to-end capabilities for continuous delivery. Kovair Omnibus offers integrations with more than 115+ multifunction, multivendor tools and applications. This also supports open-source tools covering all phases of ALM, PPM, PLM, ERP, CRM and ITSM functions as well as integrating with custom in-house tools. Some of the key benefits of Kovair Omnibus include the following:
- Provides synchronization of data between tools over heterogenous and hybrid cloud environment, including 5G Edge Cloud Enablement
- Facilitates connections to existing tools and applications and makes them part of the integrated tools ecosystem by protecting the investment of the organization, and can be offered as a Service, the hybrid multi-cloud
- Provides Low Code/No Code Drag-and-Drop configurable task-based CI/CD Pipeline
- Monitor & manage multiple pipelines across multiple projects with complete visibility to Value Stream
- Supports Secure edge computing with deployments over public/private/hybrid cloud, Kubernetes clusters or any on premise and VM environment
- Allows for hybrid multi-cloud solutions, with secure, DRaaS (disaster recovery as a service).
Kovair ALM
Kovair ALM has a centralized Web based platform allowing stakeholders to collaborate, manage, and track the progress of a release across all phases of Application Lifecycle Management – ALM. Process Compliance solutions offered in Kovair ALM leverages it’s concurrent task-based workflow engine which helps automate all the phases of reviewing and monitoring risks on a regular basis. Additionally, Kovair ALM continuously updates the risk plans, which can be part of the ISO 27005 Security Risk Management Process, ISO 26262 compliance to automotive standards, and other workflow standards such as standards for medical IoT compliance. Kovair’s graphical editor-based mouse click configurable task-based workflow engine enables organizations to implement central governance cutting across different phases of ALM.
Kovair PPM
Kovair PPM is a one stop solution that provides a unified platform to manage budgets, schedules, resources, and field data through a single interface. Kovair PPM delivers greater value to the organization by connecting the entire lifecycle from planning to execution. IT leaders can optimize their project portfolios, manage the capacity of resources against the demands raised from different projects, and connects plans and resources to the actual project execution. Using Kovair PPM, organizations can define strategic initiatives for portfolio to projects to their outcomes. It allows leaders to define strategic initiatives, choose the relevant projects for execution, provide deeper insights into development phases, projects and programs by generating EVMs (Earned Value Management — EVM metrices). Kovair PPM provides valuable inputs to the management, enabling them in making data-oriented decisions, with Time and Cost Management of a project. Kovair PPM not only provides a complete visibility across the entire value stream but also provides a complete visibility of the delivery lifecycle. Kovair PPM provides management dashboards covering three perspectives (Resource, Time & Cost) to the C-Level executives as well as to the stakeholders of projects through role-based real-time reports & dashboards.
Key Capabilities of Kovair’s Value Stream Management Platform- KVSMP
- Provides industry-specific, guided templates empowering teams to instantly begin process compliant workflows, within the Value Stream.
- Provides integrations with multiple security tools providing visibility to security vulnerabilities, in open source software, or other risks such as inventory control problems to cloud-based resiliency problems in the field
- Gives complete visibility of Risks threats or opportunities through real-time reports & dashboards, including process compliance dashboards, throughout the Value Stream
- Allows managers to define and maintain instantaneous traceability between Design, Process requirements, Risks and Hazards, to operational metrics from tools like APM (applications performance monitoring), in the field
- Supports cross-platform installation, complete CI/CD solutions, with containerization supported for microservices, all from remote role-based, process-compliant email controls
- Kovair DevSecOps supports notification on the build status, so every movement is notified to management
- Kovair’s project planning solutions include a task scheduler, project calendar, resource availability, GANTT Charts, and workload management. This allows managers to plan and control the application development from the beginning to the end with complete product lifecycle management, within the Value Stream.
- It provides complete insight into release progress & process efficiency through real-time reports & dashboards for thorough value stream management analysis.
Key Benefits of Kovair’s Value Stream Management Platform – KVSMP
Kovair’s Value Stream Management Platform – KVSMP, with its tool chain enables organizations with complete visibility across the value stream to ensure customer satisfaction. The several benefits of KVSMP are:
- Targeted and systematic waste reduction – Provides unified view to senior management, through middle management to the operations, administration, sales and logistics teams. This enables early detection of bottlenecks and elimination of waste at every step of delivery.
- Ensure Process Governance – Offers task-based workflow both at macro and micro levels to ensure governance across and within every team involved in delivery.
- Improve cross-functional collaboration – Enables collaboration between tools, processes and teams over hybrid infrastructure environment.
- Gain improved productivity – Provides complete visibility with respect to triple constraints of Time, Resource and Cost enabling better productivity through efficient usage of resources.
- Increase Process Efficiency – Offers secure and efficient integration seamlessly with best-of-breed applications with Kovair’s award-winning Omnibus multi-cloud iPaaS solution.
Conclusion
Kovair with its tools provides a complete Value Stream Management Platform for DevSecOps to organizations and can be now leveraged for Industry4.0 services. Starting from capturing the voice of customer and defining what is of value for them, Kovair VSMP for DevSecOps provides a structured toolchain to allow CIOs and CTOs of Digital Transformation initiatives. To know more about Kovair products visit www.kovair.com