This article is based on reporting originally published by TechBeacon, drawing on commentary from security practitioners including Ryan O’Leary (WhiteHat Security), Chris Romeo (Security Journey), and Manish Gupta (ShiftLeft).
Why DevSecOps Matters
Organizations integrating security into their DevOps pipelines must unite application development, IT operations, and security teams under a shared DevSecOps model. The core goal is straightforward: make security a native part of the software development workflow, not an afterthought bolted on just before a production release.
Traditional waterfall development models treated security as a late-stage gate. In a CI/CD world—where teams may push dozens of releases per day—that approach is simply incompatible with the pace of modern software delivery. The faster you release code, the faster vulnerabilities can reach production if security is not embedded throughout the process.
Below are six foundational best practices for teams building or maturing a DevSecOps capability.
1. Make Automation Your Foundation
Speed is a core tenet of DevOps. For security to keep pace with a CI/CD pipeline, it must be automated. Security controls and tests need to be embedded early and at every stage of the development lifecycle—not just at the end.
Two primary categories of automated security testing deserve attention:
- Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Analyzes source code for potential vulnerabilities without executing the application. When running SAST on nightly builds, scan only for changes committed that day rather than the entire codebase. Scanning everything every night is slow and makes it harder to keep up with daily code changes.
- Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST): Tests a running application for vulnerabilities in real time. DAST catches issues—such as those on the OWASP Top 10 list, including SQL injection—that static analysis may miss. Automating DAST scans against recent code changes gives teams a second layer of coverage.
Using both SAST and DAST in an automated, complementary fashion is preferable to relying on either alone. Adding automated security analysis directly within CI platforms limits the introduction of vulnerable code at the earliest possible stage. Lightweight embedded runtime agents can provide correlated analysis alongside static findings, helping developers prioritize which issues to fix first.
Tools commonly used across the DevSecOps toolchain include Checkmarx, Splunk, Contrast Security, Sonatype, Tanium, InSpec, FireEye, and Metasploit, among others.
2. Audit and Manage Your Code Dependencies
Open-source software is ubiquitous in modern application development, but it introduces supply-chain risk. Developers rarely have time to audit every third-party library they pull in, which means known vulnerabilities in those components can go undetected for months or even years.
Automated dependency checking is therefore a fundamental DevSecOps requirement. The OWASP Dependency-Check utility scans your code and its open-source component libraries against a continuously updated database of known vulnerabilities, flagging components that contain documented flaws before they reach production.
Beyond scanning, teams need processes for tracking and remediating identified issues. Simply knowing a vulnerable component exists is not enough—you also need to understand what impact that vulnerability has on any code that depends on it, and prioritize remediation accordingly.
3. Introduce Security Checks Incrementally
One of the most common mistakes when rolling out SAST tooling in a CI/CD chain is enabling too many security rules at once. Flooding developers with hundreds of findings from the moment a tool goes live creates alert fatigue, damages trust in the tool, and slows down development—defeating the purpose of DevSecOps.
A better approach is to start small:
- Enable one or two security rules initially—for example, checks for SQL injection errors only.
- Let developers experience the tool catching real issues in their normal workflow.
- Build trust in the tool before layering on additional rules.
- Expand coverage gradually as the team becomes comfortable with the feedback loop.
The same incremental philosophy applies to the broader DevSecOps program. Identify the full set of activities that need to go into your DevSecOps build, choose one to prove out first, demonstrate success, and then move on to the next. Security professionals who try to change everything at once risk slowing down delivery and creating conflict with development teams.
4. Choose Tools That Fit a DevOps Workflow
Not all security tools are designed for the pace of a CI/CD pipeline. When evaluating DevSecOps tooling, keep these criteria in mind:
- Pipeline integration: Tools must integrate natively into the development pipeline so developers do not have to leave their existing toolset to initiate scans or review results. If initiating a scan requires extra manual steps, developers will skip it.
- Speed: Results need to be available quickly enough to be actionable within a sprint or a build cycle.
- Accuracy: False positives are particularly damaging in a DevOps environment. Every false positive wastes time a developer or security engineer must spend verifying a finding. Tools should produce results that are immediately actionable.
- Contextual vulnerability identification: Tools designed for waterfall development typically match code against known signatures. DevSecOps tools should understand the software’s context and data flows, not just match patterns, so they can surface risks that are actually exploitable in your specific application.
- Coverage: The tool should address known vulnerabilities, OWASP Top 10 risks, and risks introduced by open-source components, and should provide data that helps reduce mean time to resolution.
5. Do Threat Modeling—Even When It’s Hard
Threat modeling is one DevSecOps activity that cannot be fully automated. It requires human reasoning about how an attacker might approach your application, what assets are at risk, and where your controls have gaps.
The SANS Institute recommends conducting threat modeling and risk assessments before or alongside a shift to DevSecOps. A structured threat modeling exercise can surface architectural and design flaws that automated scanning tools are unlikely to find—because those tools test what the code does, not whether the architecture itself is fundamentally safe.
In a CI/CD environment, the perception that threat modeling slows velocity is a genuine obstacle. The practical solution is to treat threat modeling as a design-time activity: run it when new features or significant changes are being designed, and use lightweight formats that fit an agile cadence rather than requiring weeks-long waterfall-style exercises. The value is that it trains developers to think like attackers, which pays dividends across everything else they build.
6. Invest in Secure Coding Training for Developers
Tools and automation are necessary but not sufficient. One of the most persistent challenges in DevSecOps is that many developers were never formally taught secure coding practices—it remains an undertaught subject in computer science curricula and an under-prioritized skill on most development teams.
Organizations need to invest in developer security education. This means:
- Providing structured training on common vulnerability classes (e.g., OWASP Top 10) and how to avoid them.
- Making security knowledge accessible in context—for example, integrating guidance into the IDE or code review process rather than requiring developers to seek it out separately.
- Building a security culture where developers view secure coding as part of their professional craft, not as an external requirement imposed on them.
Getting organizational buy-in for this investment is itself a challenge. Development, security, and operations teams have historically operated in silos with separate priorities. Making the case for DevSecOps—and for the training budget it requires—is a people and culture challenge as much as a technical one.
Summary
| # | Practice | Key Point |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Automate security testing | Use both SAST and DAST; scan incrementally, not the full codebase every time |
| 2 | Audit code dependencies | Use tools like OWASP Dependency-Check to flag vulnerable open-source components |
| 3 | Introduce checks gradually | Start with one or two rules; build developer trust before expanding coverage |
| 4 | Choose CI/CD-native tools | Prioritize integration, speed, accuracy, and contextual analysis |
| 5 | Do threat modeling | Cannot be fully automated; surfaces architectural risks other tools miss |
| 6 | Train developers | Secure coding must be taught; culture and buy-in matter as much as tooling |
DevSecOps is not a single tool purchase or a one-time process change. It is an ongoing effort to embed security thinking, tooling, and culture into every stage of software delivery. Starting small, automating thoughtfully, and investing in people alongside tooling are the foundations of a program that can scale.