Security and development agility have now become key focus areas for all enterprises as applications and technology become the pillars holding up the world of work. This has led to the rise of DevSecOps as a development methodology. 

As DevSecOps evolves towards becoming the default way of robust application development, the way modern applications are built, tested, deployed, and managed fundamentally changes as well.

Today agile and iterative development is becoming a mainstay as enterprise and consumer needs, along with technology, continue to evolve. The modern development ecosystem has to be powered for performance and has to create an ecosystem that optimizes the development process, security, and operations.

The Key Challenges of Modern Application Development

Siloed workflows, security vulnerabilities, manual tasks, and processes that do not contribute to the heavy lifting of development can have a significant impact on development agility. Information silos, in particular, can hinder efficiency and productivity. Delays, errors, and inefficiencies can slow down development and increase the burden on quality assurance. 

Furthermore, the speed of development facilitated by DevOps is largely due to automation. Therefore, processes that require manual intervention can be counterproductive to the expected benefits.

Fixing security loopholes and shifting security left has led to the rise of the DevSecOps. This approach is now essential for the security of all modern applications as the security landscape becomes more volatile and sophisticated.

Enterprises leverage many tools to navigate these complexities of the modern application development world. They have to identify and cobble together a multitude of tools and technologies to maximize workflows, improve feedback loops, enable continuous experimentation and learning, and make security airtight.

The only problem – most of these multiple tools were not designed to work together to build a DevSecOps toolchain. 

In the absence of a comprehensive toolchain specifically for DevSecOps organizations spend more time to 

acquire point tools and integrate these tools in the development ecosystem. They need to then train users on all the tools , and administer these tools which is time consuming and expensive. The costs continue to add up to enable user context-switching between all these tools.

Enterprises recognize this as Gartner’s DevOps Platforms report states, ‘…By 2027, 75% of organizations will have switched from multiple point solutions to DevOps platforms to streamline application delivery, up from 25% in 2023.”

GitLab to the Rescue

GitLab identified these enterprise challenges and developed a complete DevSecOps platform designed to empower Dev, Sec, and Ops teams for velocity and agility. This comprehensive platform allows enterprises to deliver software faster with this all-in-one DevSecOps solution with security integrated throughout the platform.

This platform solves modern development challenges by:

• Boosting Development Efficiency

GitLab is currently the most comprehensive AI-powered enterprise DevSecOps platform and brings the power of AI to development. Capabilities like code suggestions and code optimizations allow developers to write better code faster and more efficiently.

AI also enhances security testing and analysis, observability, automatic error detection, and patch management. Proactive vulnerability detection further improves development quality. Developers can easily analyze large code bases to find potential errors or security vulnerabilities and get patch fixes.

Developers can streamline continuous integration and deployment and identify code modifications that might lead to conflicts proactively. The ability to create code with simple natural language commands, smart code completion, and automated test case creation further boosts developer efficiency.

• AI Delivers the Right Security Guardrails

Accelerating vulnerability discovery and mitigation and baking security into the development workflow is imperative for modern applications. Significant development time is spent in identifying and mitigating vulnerabilities. Unchecked vulnerabilities or leaks can impact code quality and create security loopholes that impact software quality and performance.

DevSecOps platforms have to provide the right tools that improve vulnerability discovery and mitigation. With the GitLab platform enterprises can remove the constant back-and-forth between development and application security teams to agree on their vulnerability fix approaches easily.

The GitLab offers a Vulnerability Explanation feature that summarizes detected vulnerabilities and their implications and provides in-depth solutions and suggestions for developer workflows. This accelerates resolution times and ensures safe code creation within development workflows.

The platform also enables teams to automatically scan for vulnerabilities in source code, containers, dependencies, and running applications, track changes and implement controls to protect what goes into production. It ensures greater adherence to license compliance and regulatory frameworks to strengthen security and allow enterprises to manage threat vectors.

• Value Stream Management

In today’s business world, organizations require the ability to predict the future behavior of their value stream metrics. It is essential to identify anomalies quickly within the software development lifecycle to manage the value stream effectively. Having a complete view of the DevSecOps metrics helps in resolving process bottlenecks and achieving business objectives more efficiently. 

GitLab allows enterprises to continuously monitor and improve the development lifecycle, assess the impact of process improvements, and take a deep dive into roadblocks. Enterprises can benchmark engineering teams, improve DevOps efficiency, and communicate software delivery performance updates to business stakeholders.  

The platform offers a suite of AI capabilities to predict productivity metrics, identify potential areas for future improvement, advance planning, and aid decision-making.

• Developer Experience

Developers’ productivity is closely linked to their experience while working. If the tools and workflows are not smooth and efficient, it can negatively impact their work experience and result in reduced productivity. This, in turn, can lead to employee retention issues. 

To address this problem, enterprises need to provide an intuitive, comprehensive, and collaborative DevSecOps platform that streamlines workflows, reduces developmental load, and enables efficient collaboration among developers.

GitLab takes the developer experience to the next level with its comprehensive features and helpful functionalities. The platform provides portfolio planning and management for DevSecOps through epics, groups (programs), and milestones to organize and track progress.

Development teams can align and track project work, focus on the right things at the right time, and maintain end-to-end visibility and traceability of issues throughout the delivery lifecycle from idea to production.

Continuous team collaboration throughout every stage of the development lifecycle and fully integrated user experience that reduces context switching further enhances developer experience and contributes towards developer motivation and productivity.

In Conclusion

As the rate of change accelerates, companies must focus on improving their capacity to assist development teams and eliminate the barriers that hinder their ability to track work from conception to completion. GitLab’s DevSecOps platform elevates DevOps to the next level and pushes the boundaries of what is achievable to optimize DevOps.

Connect with our team of experts to implement GitLab AI for tangible efficiency gains and see quantifiable results.