DevOps Challenges That Every B2B Saas Must Overcome To Succeed: Keeping your data safe and compliant.

April 21, 2022 | 4 min Read

In today’s world, safeguarding your company’s assets is important. This requires a rigorous security strategy and compliance.

In the United States in 2020, there were over >1001 data breaches, affecting 158 million people >as a result of insufficient security practices.

You must protect not only your assets, but also the sensitive information of your clients, otherwise companies would refuse to do business with you.

While security and compliance differ significantly, they are strongly linked. Security refers to a set of measures, methods, and processes put in place to protect company assets.

On the other hand, compliance is mainly focused on conforming with regulations, standards, and/or best practices. In the world of B2B SaaS, compliance is a must. If you don’t adhere, you’ll have a difficult time getting larger clients, and insurance won’t cover errors and omissions. If you want to stay in business, you need to address both security and compliance.

SECURITY BEST PRACTICES

We propose following a few recommended practices when putting in place basic security Cloud infrastructure.

1. Protect Cloud Accounts and Networks

Begin by categorizing workloads by account, according to their function and data sensitivity or compliance needs. Each account’s networking layout must be divided into at least two subnets: public and private. Everything else must be in the private network, except for services that are strictly required to be exposed. When it comes to your network, the defense-in-depth strategy should be used. This will provide you with multiple layers of security methods and controls to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the network and data.

Additionally, using a VPN or SSH, access to the resources and internal services in your company’s private network.

2. Keep Your Data Safe

Data must be encrypted when it is in transit and at rest using SaaS data encryption. It must be secured at all three of these points; in use, in transit, and at rest. Once it is encrypted, your data should be classified to ensure it’s being used for the right purpose and with the right people.

3. Identity and Access Management

An information security program’s identity and access management are key components. Only authorized and authenticated users and components should have access to your resources, and only in the ways you intend. For anything and everything, Multi-factor Authentication (MFA) is required. Make password complexity a requirement in your company.

According to the Least Privilege Principle, give users the least amount of access they need to do their jobs. Use a secure secret management system. If you’re using AWS, you’ll want to enable AWS Security HUB. Make use of IAM Roles, Services accounts, or something similar. When possible, avoid managing credentials; cloud providers offer tools like AWS IAM Roles to grant access to resources without managing credentials.

4. Pipeline security should be implemented

You will want to safeguard every step of your development pipeline, not just your data and access control. It is important to include security as early as possible in the development process. DevSecOps is a term used to describe this process. To begin, you must:

  • Static analysis or Static Application Security Testing should be enabled: detect security vulnerabilities in our source code, we need to evaluate it.

  • Enable Dynamic Application Security Testing: identify security vulnerabilities and weaknesses in a running application.

The OWASP Top Ten is a great way to start when it comes to figuring out what kinds of vulnerabilities you should be looking for.

5. Auditing Tools

Your company will want to keep track of security records, audits, notifications, and other important information.

  • A Security HUB would allow you to organize all of your security alerts in one place.

  • In order to offer documentation that will authenticate security actions, use audit trails to catalog events or procedures.

Getting Compliant

Compliance with well-known certifications such as ISO, SOC2, and others will be necessary sooner or later, but you may start by demonstrating to your clients that you can execute a formal approach to security with CCM from CSA. Certifications, while costly and time-consuming, indicate to your clients your company’s maturity and knowledge.

The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) is the leading organization dedicated to defining the best practices for safeguarding cloud computing environments. Free of charge, CSA will offer you with the tools to self-assess your organization’s maturity against any market standard.

CSA provides a number of self-assessment guides and checklists as part of the process. Since 2009, CSA has been developing this technique, achieving more and more coverage with each release, including the most recent version, CMM 4.0. (Cloud Control Matrix). Once completed, you’ll have a maturity level that you may compare to other organizations as well as a market standard of your choice.

Conclusion

It’s never too early to improve your security and compliance processes. When your company prioritizes security and compliance, not only will your assets be safer, but your clients will have faith in your knowledge. These best practices, when implemented correctly, will help your company in keeping secure and compliant.