Businesses everywhere are modernizing through digital transformation. Upgrades bring faster services and new features, increasing the need to introduce innovation earlier in the development process. However, this transition can be difficult for organizations running Oracle EBS. So, are you ready for new approaches to DevSecOps?
Adopting DevSecOps in Oracle EBS is quite feasible if you use the right technology. It’s simple enough to change lines of code. But without automation, implementing those changes across the board will slow you down.
Why DevSecOps Practices Matter
With DevSecOps, you take a “shift-left” approach to testing and automation, which moves testing, quality, and performance evaluation earlier in the development life cycle. This helps you to spot issues before they make it into production and negatively impact performance or other delivery processes. It costs much less to fix a bug when you find it early.
Along with shift left comes the developer-first approach. This places more responsibility for security on developers, rather than seeing security as a secondary consideration. You start with security in mind, building applications that are rigorously designed.
Another key element of DevSecOps is to see everything as code, even infrastructure. Now that cloud migration is common, you can manage infrastructure through software and provision infrastructure through code instead of through manual processes. Automating the management of virtualized hardware results in faster and more reliable processes.
Implement DevSecOps with Oracle E-Business Suite, and you’ll let developers focus on coding. This modern technique ensures that the code being built isn’t prone to security risks. The majority of software teams fail to integrate and automate testing and security tools within their software delivery pipeline. Organizations that use the best available tools for automation like FlexDeploy will steam ahead.
Complexities of Adapting Oracle EBS to DevSecOps
Oracle EBS poses some specific difficulties beyond the normal challenges of DevSecOps. For instance, companies typically write EBS customizations for their own business applications, which may be done in various combinations of programming languages. When it’s time to modernize, you need to move these customizations into production.
Migrating customizations brings peculiar challenges to Oracle EBS, which is already a fundamentally complex platform. Manual processes are slow and expensive, and they increase the risk of errors creeping into production. There’s only one platform that automates these processes for the Oracle ecosystem to enable modern DevSecOps practices: FlexDeploy.
Oracle EBS enterprise software applications are late to the DevSecOps party. Unlike other popular frameworks, complex EBS apps generally haven’t yet adopted best practices. Interfacing with the many enterprise apps that have already implemented these practices adds to the pressure. The sooner you modernize, the better.
FlexDeploy Brings Modern Practices to Oracle EBS
Using FlexDeploy’s platform and plugins, you can easily enable DevSecOps best practices with Oracle EBS. This is a game-changer since there is no practical way to accomplish these goals by hand. For instance, you wouldn’t be able to automate or scale a solution, and you wouldn’t have the huge number of third-party plugins FlexDeploy offers.
With its ferocious mix of features, FlexDeploy enables DevSecOps to break down silos and build secure software. Most companies have yet to maximize the advantages of automation—even more so among Oracle EBS users. Yet, agile software delivery with rapid, secure results is becoming increasingly necessary to survive in the evolving market.
Gone are the days of manually applying changes whenever you need to update programs. Now, the entire process from development to deployment is automatic. Instead of labor-intensive and variable-quality releases, you can build consistent quality into your releases while saving time and money.
Benefits of Using FlexDeploy for Oracle EBS
Without FlexDeploy’s platforms and plugins, organizations wouldn’t be able to implement DevOps practices on Oracle EBS. Users can benefit in several ways:
FlexDeploy is Easy to Get and Use
Oracle has made FlexDeploy available through the Oracle Cloud Marketplace. Now, it’s as simple to acquire this unique automation technology as it is to use it. Flexagon’s solution supports the coordinated provisioning of cloud resources and configuration management.
Software teams can easily and rapidly incorporate new code with appropriate security checks. You can use a DevSecOps approach even with the complications of Oracle EBS thanks to the simplicity of FlexDeploy.
Plugins Work With Your Existing Tools
With FlexDeploy’s numerous plugins and integrations, including those specifically for Oracle EBS, the software understands all the common languages and tools used for customizations. This makes it simple to build and deploy applications.
And with more than a hundred plugins, FlexDeploy performs well with the tools your team already uses. From source control like Git and CVS to middleware and applications from Oracle and other vendors, the different technologies work together seamlessly.
Automation Reduces Tedious Tasks
The system works as well for new projects as for upgrading existing apps. With just a few mouse clicks, you can control powerful features to produce fast and secure software. And since automation reduces labor hours and errors, it quickly delivers an ROI.
Moreover, your team will enjoy working on creative activities with effective tools, rather than manually going through tedious tasks to build and deploy applications. FlexDeploy lets you standardize what works with its elegant interface, freeing employees to work on more interesting duties.
Organizations have already seen massive gains in efficiency from FlexDeploy. For example, a team slashed a task that took a full day down to only 15 minutes. This didn’t come from cutting corners but rather an improved ability to find and correct errors.
How FlexDeploy Reins in the Complexity
FlexDeploy is built from the ground up for DevOps. It focuses on continuous delivery and release automation. As such, you can use it to orchestrate software procedures from planning through monitoring, including operations.
To solve the complexity facing EBS users, FlexDeploy unites your tool chain and automates the details of builds and deployment. Its graphical user interface supports all the staff who work on your software, such as developers and release managers. You can also control configure the entire FlexDeploy system through APIs and webhooks, so you can combine forces with other DevOps tools.
Release pipelines are a useful feature within FlexDeploy. They streamline the software life cycle and can evolve with your processes. These pipelines manage change at each step of your delivery procedures. Thus, they help build security into the heart of your development and operations, enabling DevSecOps.
With pipelines in place, you can automate the requisite stages through which any modifications must proceed. You can also combine these with manual checks if you want a person to verify any specific elements. For instance, you may have some automated quality assurance (QA) tests that require a manager’s personal approval.
By combining a few simple gates, you can control powerful automated deployments. These deployments may involve multiple steps of their own and notify people by Slack, e-mail, and other communications channels. As a result, you can easily release Oracle EBS projects, along with any number of infrastructure, database, middleware, or application projects.
DevSecOps Checklist for Oracle EBS Users
Security is at the core of DevSecOps. With numerous threats these days, it’s critical to take preventive actions. There are several security checks you can employ when maintaining Oracle EBS applications. FlexDeploy ensures your applications are protected.
Static and Dynamic Analysis
It’s important to conduct static and dynamic analysis checking. You can run these and other tests within FlexDeploy. The vulnerability checks are integrated directly within the pipeline. So, you can automatically ensure a build goes through all the necessary security checks.
If any vulnerability checks fail, FlexDeploy shows you the issue instantly within the interface. You can see which tests failed so you can take action and fix the problems in real time, before an attacker finds the vulnerability.
Shift-Left Testing
Shift-left testing with security compliance automation means you’ll expose vulnerabilities earlier. Then, you can fix problems before major impacts hit. It’s too easy for bugs to slip in when you’re dealing with complex software that combines customizations and libraries from multiple sources. Automating security becomes a practical necessity.
Secure Your Oracle EBS Environment
Don’t assume Oracle EBS is secure by default—it’s not. Instead, it’s up to you to ensure you don’t have default passwords, unhashed passwords, or other vulnerabilities. Also, when you or anyone else modifies the system, you should verify whether any security-related configurations have changed or need fixing.
Some actions you can take to secure your Oracle EBS environment and applications include:
- Only allowing uploads of necessary file types
- Encrypting network traffic with strong protocols; use TLS for Oracle EBS connections
- Updating your software regularly
- Only allowing access to network resources by users where necessary
- Tracking system and network metrics
- Staying informed about new threats
- Enforcing strong, unique, and up-to-date passwords
- Only allowing Oracle EBS access to the Internet through external web tier
Working with people from different departments including information security—but not relying on them exclusively—can contribute to your security posture. For example, automation makes tests more rigorous and runs them more often. Additional vulnerability checking is also important to secure your applications.
OWASP Standards
The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Foundation issues security standards that are widely used. For example, the OWASP Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS) offers a framework to protect web apps. The standard helps many developers avoid common web attacks, such as cross-site scripting. Companies can use the OWASP ASVS to measure their apps’ security and steer their decisions.
Tools and processes should meet OWASP standards, and Flexagon integrates out-of-box with popular security scanning tools. When you automate delivery pipelines, your code will go through security checks and provide actionable insights. Then, it’s easy to take action based on the response. You have immediate visibility and recommendations to fix issues that pop up.
For example, you can check for backdoors where hackers can break in, as well as other vulnerabilities that threaten the company. Breaches can result in data loss, reputational loss, and fines. It’s much safer to catch these holes before they’re exploited.
Using automation tools to perform security checks earlier in the development process simplifies the detection and elimination of vulnerabilities. Testing is especially important for cloud migration, such as moving to Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Threat actors increasingly target the cloud.
Flexagon’s FlexDeploy automates security verifications to give the right info to the right people at the right time. Instead of a last-minute emergency, your team can head into production calmly and confidently. Failing to use these automated security checks exposes you to risks when deploying code changes.
Success With FlexDeploy for Oracle EBS
Businesses use FlexDeploy for Oracle EBS to simplify their business software deployments. For example, a major dairy company, which has made products for many of the brands we see on our grocery shelves, have used FlexDeploy widely throughout their organization for DevSecOps purposes.
Leveraging FlexDeploy to manage software packages in business intelligence, confirms that FlexDeploy offers the “speed, consistency, and, most importantly, the visibility” needed to manage deployments.
Recently transitioned from on-premises to the Oracle cloud, they’re managing their sizable organization without seeing a negative impact on the operations required for automation. Oracle doesn’t offer its own solution but instead relies on FlexDeploy to fulfill the need for enterprise resource planning (ERP) DevSecOps.
Modern DevSecOps for Oracle EBS With FlexDeploy
Oracle EBS has its own challenges, but DevSecOps doesn’t have to be one of them. While it wouldn’t be feasible to adopt modern approaches manually, there’s a solution that automates development and delivery: FlexDeploy.
When you need to tame the complexity of Oracle EBS, FlexDeploy offers the complete package. It helps you with upgrades, migrations, development, and security testing. The key is automation, which is necessary for modern business and sits at the root of FlexDeploy.
In the fast-paced world of hacks and breaches, it’s more important than ever to implement shift-left testing and developer-first security. Organizations using Oracle EBS can’t afford to lag behind as the industry moves forward with DevSecOps.
Flexagon’s FlexDeploy is the exclusive provider of a comprehensive DevOps platform that addresses the complexities of Oracle, Salesforce and SAP. It accelerates your entire software development life cycle while improving security and reliability. Request a demo to see what FlexDeploy can do for you.
