This article draws on reporting originally published by TechTarget and expands on the key concepts for a DevOps engineering audience.
From DevOps to DevSecOps: A Natural Evolution
DevOps has fundamentally changed how development and operations teams collaborate to ship software. But as DevOps practices mature, a growing number of organizations are pushing the model one step further — by embedding security directly into the development pipeline. The result is DevSecOps: a discipline that puts security on equal footing with development and operations, rather than treating it as a final gate before release.
According to the 2017 State of DevOps Report from Puppet and DevOps Research and Assessment, 27% of survey respondents worked on a DevOps team at the time, up from 16% in 2014. As DevOps adoption has grown, so has awareness of the security gaps that traditional, end-of-cycle security reviews leave behind.
What DevSecOps Actually Means in Practice
DevSecOps is not simply a rebranding exercise. It represents a structural shift in how security responsibilities are distributed across an engineering organization. Rather than security being the sole domain of a dedicated security team that reviews code at the end of a build cycle, DevSecOps spreads that responsibility across developers, solution architects, product managers, and operations engineers.
Actifio Inc., a data management technology company, is one example cited in the original TechTarget reporting. Since moving to DevSecOps, Actifio shifted security testing to much earlier stages of product development, increased automation, and gave a broader set of roles access to security testing tools. As Actifio CSO John A. Meyers put it:
“That really embodies this movement — to get people who aren’t traditionally in this security role excited about security and find potential security risks early in the cycle.”
John A. Meyers, CSO, Actifio Inc.
The key operational shift is moving security left — integrating security checks, automated scanning, and code vetting into the continuous integration (CI) pipeline rather than deferring them until after code is merged or built.
The Core Goal: Security Without Slowing Delivery
One of the central concerns teams have when adopting DevSecOps is that adding security checkpoints will slow down release velocity. The goal of DevSecOps is precisely the opposite: by automating security checks and catching issues earlier, teams reduce the costly rework that comes from discovering vulnerabilities late in the cycle or, worse, after deployment.
Keith McCloskey, CTO of Blackstone Federal, a federal IT consulting firm, framed this well in the original reporting:
“As we’ve automated more of the IT ops pieces, and removed the repetitive tasks and made them automated, and as we’ve moved to continuous integration, now there’s a move to improve testing so organizations can vet code before it gets merged.”
Keith McCloskey, CTO, Blackstone Federal
McCloskey also emphasized removing friction between teams as a parallel goal. If securing digital assets is something that should be integrated into everything IT does, then DevSecOps — when implemented properly — should naturally lead to a more secure environment without creating new silos.
What a Successful DevSecOps Implementation Requires
Experts quoted in the original reporting identified several concrete requirements for DevSecOps adoption to succeed. These map closely to what the broader DevOps community has learned about organizational change in general.
1. A Genuine Mindset Shift
Security cannot be bolted on at the end of a sprint and then marketed as DevSecOps. Teams must genuinely internalize the idea that security is everyone’s responsibility. This requires deliberate cultural change, executive sponsorship, and internal advocacy. As Meyers noted, “It’s not something that happens organically; it requires people to buy into it.”
2. The Right Tooling — But Tooling Alone Is Not Enough
Organizations need to provide developers and architects with access to appropriate security tools — static analysis, dependency scanning, secrets detection, container image scanning, and infrastructure-as-code linting are common starting points. However, acquiring tools without the process and expertise to use them is a common failure mode. McCloskey described the pattern bluntly: organizations “don’t understand there are people and processes that have to be improved as well, so the tooling sits idly by.”
3. Automation as a Core Design Principle
Manual security reviews at scale are not sustainable. Automation is central to DevSecOps — integrating security gates into CI/CD pipelines so that scans run automatically on every pull request or commit. Frank Catucci, director of application security and DevSecOps at ImagineX Consulting, cautioned:
“It’s not plug-and-play. There are certainly some plug-ins and platforms available to help, but you’re still going to need the expertise to leverage those and to make it an actual functioning process, to make the security process automated.”
Frank Catucci, Director of Application Security and DevSecOps, ImagineX Consulting
4. Staff Training and Shared Vocabulary
Developers and security engineers often speak different languages. Part of the DevSecOps implementation work is building a common lexicon so that, for example, a CVSS score or a SAST finding is understood and actionable by a developer — not just a security analyst. Similarly, security professionals need enough understanding of the technical stack to contribute meaningfully to architecture and code review conversations.
5. Treating It as an Ongoing Process
Catucci emphasized that leaders should view DevSecOps adoption as a continuous improvement process, not a project with a defined end date. Threat landscapes evolve, technology stacks change, and team composition shifts — all of which require ongoing attention to how security is integrated into engineering workflows.
What Happens to Dedicated Security Teams?
A common misconception is that DevSecOps renders security professionals redundant. It does not. Security engineers remain essential — but their focus shifts. Routine, automatable checks are handled by pipeline tooling, freeing security professionals to focus on higher-value work: threat modeling, penetration testing, architecture review, incident response, and policy governance.
End-of-cycle security reviews do not disappear entirely either. They become less burdensome because earlier-stage automation has already caught a large category of common vulnerabilities. As McCloskey explained: “DevSecOps gives us higher-level automation and moves security folks up the chain.”
Key Takeaways for Engineering Teams
- Shift left: Integrate security testing into the CI pipeline at the pull-request stage, not as a post-build gate.
- Distribute responsibility: Make security tooling accessible to developers, architects, and product managers — not just the security team.
- Automate ruthlessly: Static analysis, dependency auditing, container scanning, and secrets detection should run automatically on every code change.
- Invest in culture: Tooling without process change and training will stall. Leadership buy-in and cross-team collaboration are prerequisites.
- Build shared language: Security findings need to be interpretable and actionable by the people closest to the code.
- Plan for the long term: DevSecOps maturity is an ongoing journey, not a one-time implementation project.
Original reporting by TechTarget. Quotes are attributed to John A. Meyers (Actifio), Keith McCloskey (Blackstone Federal), Frank Catucci (ImagineX Consulting), and Ajay K. Gupta (University of Maryland University College).