TechSparks2022: Thales launches its free-forever data security solution for DevSecOp teams

We live in a world today where almost every business idea can be birthed to life through a software or an application. When you take a quick sneak peak into behind the scenes, you’ll realise that there is a very important team which plays a crucial role in deploying the software application - DevSecOps team.

Essentially, DevSecOps stands for Development, Security, and Operations. It is a trending practice in application security that involves introducing security earlier in the software development life cycle.

DevSecOps automates the integration of security at every phase of the software development lifecycle, from initial design through integration, testing, deployment, and software delivery. This helps in minimising the vulnerabilities in the software code. It expands the collaboration between development and operations teams to integrate security teams in the software delivery cycle.

At the 13th edition of TechSparks 2022, Deepak Thekkedath, the Pre-Sales Engineer of Thales, launched a new security solution called the CipherTrust Platform Community Edition, that’ll help DevSecOp teams to deploy data protection controls into multi-cloud applications in minutes instead of weeks.

Thales is a global company that provides security for a world powered by cloud, data, and software. It has four main businesses- Aerospace, Space, Defence & Security, and Digital Identity & Security and it’s a technology leader in each of these business domains. The company has more than 81,000 employees spanning across 68 countries in five continents and is trusted by businesses and governments around the world to protect their most critical assets.

Challenges faced by DevSecOp teams

While launching the Community Edition, Deepak enumerated the various challenges DevSecOps team currently face and how the CipherTrust Platform Community Edition is a quick, easy and viable solution for these challenges.

“Normally, when a DevOps team is developing a software code or application, if there is any change in the security parameters they have to keep on changing the codes. So if any new algorithm or keys needs to be integrated in their codes, the security parameters will also keep changing”, he said.

He further explained that deploying such a high level of security for software codes can sometimes be outside the domain expertise of any developer and learning about these parameters becomes time consuming which ultimately affects the timelines of the product delivery.

And finally now with most organisations moving to a cloud environment it becomes essential for the DevSecOp teams to understand cloud-based security and incorporate it into their application.

“CipherTrust Platform Community Edition automates data protection instead of forcing a new step in the development process. It includes proper key management, user-based accessibility and easy deployment of the solution on premise, cloud or hybrid models, Deepak said.

Key features of the product

Using automated pull and deploy, the community edition gives key management, transparent encryption, and tokenisation. It contains two connectors - a CipherTrust Data Protection Gateway (DPG) and a CipherTrust Transparent Encryption for Kubernetes.

The DPG ensures that data which is transferred from the application server to the database is safe and secure by encrypting the data. By automating the security system, it acts as a gateway between the application server and the client application, tokenising or encrypting the data. Thus the data which finally goes into the database is in an encrypted format. Essentially this feature reduces the burden of automation of the security from the developers.

CipherTrust Transparent Encryption (CTE) for Kubernetes (CTE-K8S) helps organisations to combat ransomware attacks. Ransomware usually encrypts the data in a hard drive. CTE will protect the file, prohibiting unauthorised writes and reads from users and processes – which prevents ransomware from damaging, locking up or encrypting files within a persistent volume.CTE-K8S protects files used by containers through their Persistent Volume Claims.

“Using these features, we have separated the security part for the developers and we are taking care of the complete protection of the data, so that developers can concentrate only on their applications and codes. It’s very easy to implement as well- with just three four lines of code, you can easily insert your application and the complete automation is done by the CipherTrust Data Security Platform. We also make sure to take care of data protection while the data is in transit and at rest,” said Deepak.

The Community Edition includes a free-forever version of CipherTrust Manager with no expiration date and three licenses for CipherTrust Transparent Encryption for Kubernetes (CTE-K8S) and CipherTrust Data Protection Gateway (DPG).