More enterprises are embracing DevOps to improve development agility and speed up the rollout of business applications. But speed can amplify security risks. Striking the right balance between business agility and information security requires integrating the security team into the DevOps methodology — a shift that is as much cultural as it is technical.
According to the DigiCert 2017 Inviting Security into DevOps Survey, which polled 300 senior IT, DevOps, and security management professionals across organizations of varying sizes that had already implemented DevOps, 98 percent of respondents had made integrating security into their DevOps methodology a priority. Of those, 49 percent were in the process of integrating security, while the other 49 percent had already completed the effort — and reported that the integration had improved both development agility and information security.
Why the Integration Imperative Is So Urgent
Respondents cited clear business consequences for failing to integrate security with DevOps:
- 78% cited increased costs as a risk of poor integration
- 73% cited slower application delivery
- 71% cited increased security risks
Underscoring the real-world impact, 59 percent of respondents said they sometimes or often encounter rogue certificates — certificates issued within their organization outside of established security controls and often invisible to the security team until problems arise.
If you are preparing to integrate security into your DevOps practice, your first question is likely: Where do we begin? The following four steps provide a practical framework.
Step 1: Appoint a Social Leader
Before any tooling or process changes, you need a champion — someone who will drive the cultural change by clearly defining the roles that IT, security, and DevOps will each play, and who will oversee the integration of these traditionally separate teams.
This person might be your Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Risk Officer, or simply someone with the credibility and interpersonal skills to evangelize change across organizational boundaries. The critical requirement is that they understand why the integration matters to the business and can communicate that compellingly to both developers and security professionals.
In some organizations, a single champion will not be enough. You may need representatives from both the development and security sides who can act as translators between the two cultures. As one survey respondent — a senior project manager at a large New York-based manufacturing company — put it:
“The security folks are just different animals, but then, so are the developers. You have to deal with egos and fights over methodologies.”
Acknowledging that tension openly, rather than pretending it does not exist, is itself an important first step.
Step 2: Bring Security to the Table Early
One of the most common failure patterns in traditional software delivery is treating security as a final gate — a checkpoint at the end of the development lifecycle that either stamps approval or, more painfully, halts a release after weeks of work. This late-stage involvement is both expensive and demoralizing for development teams.
The more effective approach is to embed a security lead on every DevOps initiative from day one. When security requirements and constraints are understood at the design stage, they become inputs to the work rather than obstacles at the finish line.
Practical steps at this stage include limiting access controls from the start and implementing automated Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) so that signing and encrypting communication within the network becomes a standard part of the workflow rather than an afterthought.
“The faster that we implement something, the more likely it is to have vulnerability issues. That’s why for us security is so important — it saves us time and money in the long run.”
— IT Manager, large U.S. manufacturing firm
Step 3: Invest in Automation — Strategically
Automation is central to DevOps, and security is no exception. The goal is to embed baseline security practices directly into the CI/CD pipeline so they happen consistently and without manual intervention slowing the team down.
Key areas to consider automating include:
- Certificate management: Rather than requiring developers to make manual requests to the security team every time a new project needs a digital certificate, automate the request and provisioning process. This reduces delays and significantly lowers the risk of rogue or expired certificates.
- Vulnerability scanning: Automated scanning ensures that the libraries developers depend on are up to date with security patches before code is shipped, catching issues early when they are cheapest to fix.
- Static code analysis: Integrating static analysis tools into the build pipeline surfaces common security flaws without requiring manual code review for every change.
- Patch management: Automating the application of known security patches to infrastructure reduces the window of exposure.
One important caveat: 100 percent automation should not be the goal. If a task is simple, infrequent, or genuinely difficult to automate reliably, a manual process is perfectly acceptable. Reserve automation investment for tasks that are repetitive, error-prone, and on the critical path of delivery.
Step 4: Integrate and Standardize
Fragmentation is one of the biggest enemies of secure DevOps at scale. When different teams use different libraries, different certificate authorities, or different toolchains, the attack surface grows and audit becomes nearly impossible.
Standardization addresses this directly. Rather than allowing each team to select its own dependency libraries, choose a curated, enterprise-approved set and enforce their use across all projects. The same principle applies to certificate management — implement controls that integrate with your server configuration and orchestration platforms (such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, or Kubernetes) so that certificate lifecycle management happens automatically and consistently in the background.
Standardization also makes onboarding faster. New team members inherit a known-good toolchain rather than having to learn a team-specific set of ad hoc choices.
The Payoff Is Real
Integrating security and DevOps is neither quick nor easy. It requires sustained leadership commitment, process redesign, tooling investment, and — most importantly — cultural change. But the evidence from organizations that have done it is encouraging: those that completed integration were significantly more likely to report confidence in their information security posture, their ability to meet application delivery deadlines, and their success in reducing application security risk.
The shift from treating security as a downstream gatekeeper to treating it as an embedded, upstream partner is the defining move. Everything else — the automation, the standardization, the tooling — supports that fundamental change in how teams relate to each other and to the risk they share.
This article is based on reporting originally published by The Enterprisers Project, drawing on findings from the DigiCert 2017 Inviting Security into DevOps Survey.