This article is based on insights originally published on devops.com, drawing on contributions from industry experts featured in the eBook The State of DevSecOps.
What Is DevSecOps, Really?
The term DevSecOps is easy to decode on the surface: it inserts “Sec”—security—into the DevOps lifecycle. But the philosophy runs much deeper than adding a security scan to a CI pipeline. DevSecOps represents a fundamental shift in how engineering organisations think about, own, and operationalise security throughout the entire software development and delivery process.
To ground the definition in practitioner experience, industry experts contributed their perspectives to The State of DevSecOps eBook. Their answers, condensed below, resolve into five core attributes—plus an overarching cultural principle—that collectively define what DevSecOps means in practice.
1. Security Automation
DevSecOps embeds security objectives directly into automated pipelines. Ben Newton, Director of Product Marketing and Evangelism at Sumo Logic, defines DevSecOps as making security requirements and objectives a first-class part of the continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) cycle—not an afterthought bolted on at release time.
In practice, this means integrating tools such as static application security testing (SAST), software composition analysis (SCA), and container image scanning into the same pipeline that builds and tests application code. When a security check fails, it fails the build—just as a broken unit test would.
2. A Culture of Security
Tooling alone cannot produce DevSecOps. The practice requires a team culture that genuinely embraces security as a shared responsibility. Newton describes the security team’s role as providing “clear guardrails for developers as to what is fair game and what is not appropriate from a security perspective.”
This involves developer security training, threat-modelling workshops, and documented secure coding standards—so that every engineer, not just the security specialist, can identify and avoid common vulnerabilities. Security expertise must be distributed across the DevOps lifecycle rather than confined to a separate audit phase.
3. De-Siloing IT and Security
DevOps eroded the traditional wall between software engineering and IT operations. DevSecOps takes that further. As Tim Jarrett, Senior Director of Product Management at Veracode, put it: “DevSecOps further erases the walls between the DevOps team and IT Security.”
Dan Hubbard, Chief Product Officer at Lacework, reinforced this: “DevSecOps is about building a bridge between the security and DevOps teams.” In organisational terms, this might mean embedding security engineers in product squads, creating shared on-call rotations, or co-owning security metrics in the same dashboards used for availability and deployment frequency.
4. Security Shifts Left
“Shifting left” means moving security activities earlier in the software development lifecycle—into design, coding, and pull-request review—rather than waiting until pre-production testing or post-deployment audits.
Traditionally, IT security has been viewed through a risk-avoidance and compliance lens, functioning as a gate that software must pass through before release. Jarrett argues that within DevSecOps, “security is better positioned to integrate earlier in the development cycle where they can actually make a difference.” Catching a vulnerability during code review costs a fraction of what it costs to remediate after deployment.
5. Security Enables, Not Stalls
A common objection to integrating security into DevOps is that it will slow teams down. DevSecOps rejects this premise. As Dan Hubbard described, DevSecOps must “support the need for DevOps to move fast, but in a way where security is not ignored.”
The mechanism is a security-as-code mindset: security policies, compliance checks, and threat-detection rules are expressed as versioned, testable code rather than manual checklists. Automated guardrails can run in seconds inside a pipeline, returning actionable feedback to the developer without blocking delivery velocity. When security is a friction point, it signals a process problem—not an inherent conflict between speed and safety.
Putting the Traits Together
The five traits are mutually reinforcing:
- Security automation makes enforcement consistent and fast.
- A culture of security ensures developers understand and own what those automated checks enforce.
- De-siloing gives security teams the visibility and context they need to write relevant rules.
- Shifting left reduces the cost of finding defects and removes the last-minute bottleneck.
- Enabling rather than stalling builds organisational trust so that security is seen as a partner, not a gatekeeper.
Taken together, these principles give engineering leaders—CIOs, CTOs, and platform engineering managers—a practical DevSecOps doctrine applicable across nearly any software development and release environment. The goal is not to make development more complicated, but to make security invisible by weaving it into the work developers already do.
Key Takeaways
- DevSecOps is a culture and process shift, not merely a tooling addition.
- Security must be an explicit, automated part of CI/CD pipelines.
- Developers need clear guardrails and security training to own security outcomes.
- Breaking down silos between DevOps and Security teams is essential for shared accountability.
- Moving security earlier in the lifecycle reduces remediation cost and release risk.
- Automation and a security-as-code approach allow teams to maintain delivery velocity without sacrificing safety.