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NetOps vs. NetDevOps vs. SecOps vs. EdgeOps: Your Guide to Navigating the Networking Terms

by | Jan 25, 2022 | EdgeOps, NetDevOps, SecOps

Communication,Technology,For,Internet,Business.,Global,World,Network,And,Telecommunication
NetDevOps, SecOps, and EdgeOps are crucial components of a holistic and integrated approach to network infrastructure. However, the way each practice works to achieve this objective is not immediately apparent, and understanding this paradigm can be vital to a successful implementation.

This article helps to clarify those dynamics by explaining what each concept does and how they complement each other.

What is NetDevOps?

NetDevOps refers to the convergence of DevOps and networking. It is a practice that encourages communication and collaboration between network architects and operators to automate manual and traditional network processes.

One way NetDevOps achieves automation is via software-defined networking (SDN), which supplies and configures network appliances such as routers and switches. SDN enables businesses to control network behavior through code, allowing users to replicate processes across hardware.

SDN and other automation methodologies facilitate NetDevOps collaboration by enabling multiple people to concurrently work on the same systems, appliances, and applications. In a traditional IT environment, infrastructure configuration, testing, and deployment tasks take place in a sequential fashion, which leaves some team members waiting around for their turn to contribute. In a NetDevOps environment, you can deploy entire configurations to many devices at the same time with SDN, trigger automatic tests to run at certain benchmarks, and automatically integrate necessary software with just a few button clicks. Every member of the NetDevOps team collaborates nearly simultaneously to achieve the same objective.

The goal of NetDevOps is to foster a culture and environment in which network design, tests, and deployment happen quickly and reliably.

NetOps vs. NetDevOps

You may be more familiar with the term NetOps than NetDevOps, though they mean essentially the same thing. The NetOps methodology also applies DevOps principles to enterprise network management, such as collaboration and automation. The word NetOps de-emphasizes the software development (Dev) aspect of IT operations, but NetOps still involves abstracting networking functions as code with SDN and automation. For that reason, NetDevOps is becoming a more popular term for this methodology in modern IT environments.

What are NetDevOps roles in the integration process?

Let’s break down each integration process in NetDevOps and its primary goals.

Breaking down communication silos

The primary goal of NetDevOps is to improve efficiency by fostering team collaboration and communication. More specifically, it allows teams to be more pragmatic and efficient when faced with an issue, including distributing tools throughout the IT infrastructure. Once the enterprise establishes a collaborative architecture, silos are eliminated and teams benefit from more effective communication.

Reducing manual intervention with SDN

Manually revising network infrastructure is time-consuming and prone to human error. To address these inefficiencies and ensure that automation scripts are error-free, SDN employs certain DevOps practices, such as continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD). These scripts can be re-deployed on numerous servers, rolled back, and made available to all teams.

Promoting network automation

The command-line interface (CLI) performs network operations manually, device by device. Network automation can better connect networking with IT operations and tools, allowing for more agile network workflow. It also helps automate the management, testing, and deployment of virtual and physical devices inside a network. With network automation, enterprises benefit from quicker service start, less human error, and more effective wireless management.

What is SecOps?

Security operations (SecOps) is a partnership between security and IT operations teams similar to DevOps’ role as a collaboration between development and operations teams. It helps organizations automate critical security tasks and meet performance goals without compromising on security.

SecOps follows a set of security operations center (SOC) practices, processes, and tools, such as governance, risk, and compliance (GRC) systems and security information and event management (SIEM). Integration of these security measures occurs atypically early in the software development life cycle (SDLC), which is known as “shifting left”.

In a typical SDLC—which includes product design, development, testing, and deployment—security comes at the latter life cycle stages, sometimes after testing. However, SecOps introduces security measures much earlier in the life cycle, providing better safeguards as the product development progresses.

For example, a typical SDLC looks something like this:

  • Step 1: Planning – You determine the requirements for the software’s functionality
  • Step 2: Design – You model the look and functionality of the software
  • Step 3: Development – Your dev team writes the software code
  • Step 4: Testing – Your QA team tests the code to ensure it functions correctly
  • Step 5: Security – Your security team integrates security monitoring and protection measures
  • Step 6: Deployment – You release the software to production

Security is almost an afterthought, occurring right before deployment. Often, this can lead to friction between teams – most business units want to release the software as soon as possible, but security integration may cause delays.

A SecOps SDLC looks more like this:

  • Step 1: Planning – While you determine the requirements for the software itself, you also plan the architecture for the secure development and production servers you’ll deploy to support the software.
  • Step 2: Design – Development and design teams model the software, and security and ops teams stand up secure development environments.
  • Step 3: Development – As developers write software code and upload it to the repository, automatic security checks run to test for vulnerabilities
  • Step 4: Testing – On a secure testing server, the QA team runs functional and performance tests while the security team runs additional vulnerability and security integration tests
  • Step 5: Deployment – You release the secure software to a secure production environment

Not only does SecOps prioritize security to better fortify your software, but it also streamlines the SDLC, removing an entire step from the process. SecOps empowers you to release secure, high-quality software faster.

How does SecOps complement NetDevOps?

While NetDevOps facilitates work process automation, SecOps provides the security to make those things happen safely, safeguarding NetDevOps practices from cyberattacks.

In other words, SecOps acts as a bodyguard for NetDevOps. Two primary examples are as follows:

Securing critical data center infrastructure

Both SecOps and NetDevOps promote open collaboration between security, networking, and operations teams, especially when it comes to infrastructure management and monitoring.

In traditional IT environments, separate monitoring and management tasks are siloed in different departments, with security, operations, and networking teams all working with different software and solutions on different pieces of your infrastructure. SecOps instead brings all teams together, working within the same monitoring, incident response, and infrastructure management systems. This gives your key SecOps and NetDevOps engineers a holistic view of your environment, allowing them to collaborate and ensure your infrastructure is fully protected.

Securing continuous delivery and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines

SecOps processes ensure that CI/CD pipelines (as discussed earlier) emphasize both security and speed. SecOps teams use CI security techniques to provide a secure codebase and in CD to automate security-related tasks.

For example, one of the cornerstones of the CI/CD methodologies is automated testing (for functionality, performance, and integration) which runs continuously throughout the SDLC. With SecOps processes, you can also add automated security testing at key stages in your CI/CD pipeline. That means security issues can be found and remediated as early as possible, allowing you to release your software faster.

By combining SecOps and CI/CD processes, teams and technology may work together to protect the network and codebase while avoiding bottlenecks. SecOps teams can then leverage automation to minimize application and service outages and expedite security audits.

What is EdgeOps?

EdgeOps is a quasi-DevOps approach adapted to the internet of things (IoT)/edge environment for managing and overseeing the project development lifecycle. It addresses edge computing’s difficulties, considers the features of edge-computing solutions, and utilizes deployment methods adapted to the edge environment.

A single unified dashboard can follow the progress of a project that involves multiple technologies, tools, and experts. Independent work streams or pipelines can simultaneously manage activity from several teams or organizations. EdgeOps can process, analyze, and orchestrate large volumes of machine data and events at microsecond transactions.

How does EdgeOps enhance NetDevOps?

EdgeOps is, at its essence, the application of NetDevOps principles to the edge-to-cloud continuum. Examples are as follows:

Improving data processing

By maximizing the efficiency of their manufacturing equipment, chipmakers can enhance the yield and quality of their semiconductor production processes. EdgeOps helps enterprises boost productivity and efficiency through artificial intelligence across critical areas of the infrastructure.

Promoting cost-efficient and timely data transfers

The EdgeOps platform enables real-time data ingestion, processing, and analysis by operating at the equipment source. It can therefore address data security problems and the increased cost and timing of edge-to-cloud data transport.

Allowing for scalability

Companies no longer need to develop centralized, private data centers to expand data collecting and processing. Building, maintaining, and replacing these hubs during expansion can be cost-prohibitive.

Instead, organizations can quickly and cost-effectively scale their edge network reach by combining privately-owned servers with regional edge computing data centers. EdgeOps flexibility allows companies to adapt swiftly to changing markets and scale their data and revise requirements more efficiently as they grow.

The future impact of NetOps, NetDevOps, SecOps, and EdgeOps

Secure, cloud-based automation and IoT will have increasingly significant global implications moving forward. The collaborative and agile nature of these three Ops will play an essential role in this transformation.

While each provides a different piece to the network integration puzzle, all focus on improving communication and promoting efficiency. Better automated processes, shorter feedback loops, and shared responsibilities are due to their interlace.

Want more information about how these practices help promote a seamless network infrastructure integration?

Contact ZPE Systems and get started today!

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SecOps Best Practices for Enterprises

by | Nov 30, 2021 | SecOps

Programming,Software,Interface,On,Device,By,Engineers.,Application,For,Company

SecOps is the blending of security and IT operations into one combined set of workflows, tools, and methodologies. This increases the speed at which new infrastructure can be spun up without impacting the quality or security of your systems. Let’s discuss what SecOps means, how it works, and the SecOps best practices for enterprises.

What is SecOps?

SecOps is based on the DevOps philosophy, which blends software development and IT operations teams. Infrastructure configurations are abstracted as software, which is integrated, tested, and deployed using the same processes that application developers use. The SecOps methodology takes this a step further, removing barriers between the security and IT operations teams. SecOps focuses on integrating security processes into the provisioning, deployment, and management of systems and infrastructure.

Why is SecOps important?

The operations team will spin up new virtual and physical systems completely independently of security teams in a traditional IT department. Once a machine is ready to deploy, the security team will perform security checks and vulnerability testing. If there are any issues, deployment will be delayed until Ops can remediate the problem and perform security testing again. In the meantime, any business units waiting on that system—for instance, a development team trying to release new software on a tight schedule—lose valuable time. And that’s the best-case scenario.

Sometimes, in their haste to meet business demands, Ops will ignore the red flags discovered by security teams so they can still deploy infrastructure on schedule. Or, even worse, they’ll skip the security testing altogether and hope for the best. Either way, this can leave massive security vulnerabilities in business-critical, production infrastructure. For example, the Equifax breach in 2017 was caused by lax security processes, and went undetected for so long because of an expired certificate. That means this high-profile event might have been prevented if Equifax had integrated security processes into their IT operations.

SecOps brings security and operations teams together, allowing them to work simultaneously to provision infrastructure quickly and efficiently without sacrificing quality or security.

How SecOps uses DevOps principles to improve efficiency and security

SecOps enables teams to integrate security and operations processes by abstracting them as software code and introducing automation.

For Ops, that means infrastructure configurations and updates are written as software definition files that are centrally managed in a code repository. These definition files can be deployed automatically to many devices simultaneously, allowing enterprises to scale quickly and efficiently. This methodology is called infrastructure as code (IaC), and it’s a fundamental principle of DevOps, NetDevOps, and SecOps.

On the Sec side of SecOps, automatic security testing runs at multiple stages in the infrastructure provisioning process:

  1. When the initial configuration is written: at this stage, testing is focused on bugs or mistakes in the configuration that could leave vulnerabilities open in the system.
  2. When the configuration is integrated into the code repository: automatic testing ensures that the new code doesn’t conflict with other versions or introduce any issues to existing configurations.
  3. The configuration will receive comprehensive functional, non-functional, and security testing in a dedicated testing environment before production.
  4. In production: servers are continuously monitored and tested, with additional testing performed when patches are deployed, or other changes occur in the production environment.

Automatic security testing allows your teams to “shift left,” meaning issues and vulnerabilities are spotted and fixed as early in the provisioning process as possible, so you can work faster and with greater agility to meet the demands of your enterprise. This form of continuous and automatic testing is part of the CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous delivery) methodology, which is foundational to DevOps, NetDevOps, and SecOps.

When you combine IaC with CI/CD to implement SecOps in your enterprise, you’re able to spin up your infrastructure more rapidly and catch security vulnerabilities and other issues earlier in the process. Plus, since SecOps seeks to automate as many processes as possible, you can reduce the risk of human error in your infrastructure configurations and security testing.

With SecOps, you can improve your enterprise’s security posture while still increasing your productivity and efficiency.

The top SecOps best practices for enterprises

SecOps is a methodology or framework for operational security, not a technology solution you can purchase and spin up in your datacenter. If you want to implement SecOps in your enterprise, you’ll need to:

Build a collaborative culture within your organization

SecOps focuses on blending the security and IT operations teams, which means you should foster a culture of open communication and cross-functional collaboration. Mistakes should be openly discussed and resolved as a team effort, so nobody’s afraid to ask for help or point out security issues. Everybody’s role within the organization should also be clearly outlined, so nobody’s left fearing automation or redundancy. This will allow all your SecOps teams to fully embrace new tools and processes to make a smoother transition.

Provide the proper SecOps tools and training 

You must empower your teams with the technology and training they need to implement SecOps processes successfully. In addition to automated testing and abstracting management processes as software, SecOps also requires other tools, such as:

  • Monitoring and visibility: You need to monitor, analyze, and visualize your SecOps infrastructure and applications to ensure optimal performance and security. It would be best if you partnered with a vendor-neutral solution that provides one central dashboard for observing and managing all your systems, whether they’re on-premises or in the cloud.
  • Incident response: An automated incident response solution can detect issues, follow predefined scripts and policies to remediate events automatically, and alert security teams and other stakeholders when human intervention is required.
  • Collaboration and sharing: You need a central repository with version control for your infrastructure and networking configurations. This allows your Sec and Ops teams to work with the same code simultaneously without stepping on each other’s toes.

Once you’ve chosen which tools and processes to adopt, you’ll need to train your SecOps teams on how to use them. You should also ensure your staff has enough time to become comfortable using these skills and technologies at speed required for CI/CD and SecOps.

Following these best practices will ensure that your SecOps initiative is based on a solid foundation that includes team trust and collaboration, comprehensive training, and the best tools and technology for every SecOps process.

Further help implementing SecOps best practices

The value of SecOps is that you can increase the speed and efficiency of your IT operations while ensuring that security is a priority at every stage of the deployment process. To effectively implement SecOps, your enterprise needs to foster a culture of collaboration, invest in the right tools for the job, and train your teams on how to handle new workflows and technologies. 

ZPE Systems is here to help your enterprise implement SecOps best practices. The Nodegrid family of hardware and software solutions provides SecOps capabilities such as:

  • Zero-touch provisioning to automatically configure end devices from anywhere in the world
  • Vendor-neutral interface abstraction so you can manage all your infrastructure solutions from one centralized control panel
  • Support for advanced security methodologies like Zero Trust and Security Service Edge (SSE)

Need more help implementing the SecOps best practices?

To learn more about how Nodegrid can help you implement SecOps best practices for your enterprise, contact ZPE Systems today.

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