This article is based on an interview originally published by App Developer Magazine featuring Chris Carlson, Vice President of Product Management at Qualys, a cloud security company. The interview explored what DevSecOps is, why it matters, and how engineering teams can adopt it without disrupting delivery velocity.
What Is DevSecOps?
DevSecOps stands for Development, Security, and Operations. It is a methodology that integrates cybersecurity and application security practices directly into the DevOps software delivery lifecycle — covering development, testing, building, and deployment into production environments.
The core premise is straightforward: rather than treating security as a gate at the end of the release process, DevSecOps makes security a shared responsibility distributed across the entire pipeline. According to Chris Carlson:
“The more seamless, transparent, automated, agile, and quick that security aspects — including tools, people, processes, policies, reporting, and actionable output — can be integrated into the DevOps methodology, higher adoption is realized and benefits gained for the organization.”
Chris Carlson, VP Product Management, Qualys
The goal is to deploy more secure applications into production, reduce the number of exploitable vulnerabilities that reach end users, and enable teams to remediate security issues before they can be compromised.
Is DevSecOps a New Concept?
DevSecOps is not a new idea for organizations that have long understood the business risk of insecure software. Early adoption was concentrated in industries with high security exposure and regulatory pressure, including:
- Financial services
- Technology companies
- E-commerce platforms
- Cloud computing providers
Adoption patterns vary. Some organizations roll out DevSecOps bottom-up, one project or team at a time. Others achieve faster, broader adoption through executive sponsorship that drives the methodology across the entire engineering organization simultaneously.
The concept of building security into the software development lifecycle is not new either — the Secure Software Development Life Cycle (SSDLC) has existed for years. However, DevSecOps addresses a challenge that SSDLC alone does not fully solve: the widespread use of open source libraries, components, and operating systems that the shipping organization did not write and does not control. As Carlson notes, this makes it increasingly important to adopt tooling capable of assessing, evaluating, and continuously tracking the vulnerability and compliance posture of third-party software dependencies embedded within an application.
Does Security Slow Down Development?
This is one of the most common objections to DevSecOps adoption, and the answer — when the methodology is implemented correctly — is no.
Any tool or process that is grafted awkwardly onto an existing workflow will add friction. Successful DevSecOps implementations avoid this by making security checks automated, transparent, and integrated into existing pipelines rather than added as manual interruptions.
Carlson illustrates the principle with a manufacturing analogy:
“Consider a food manufacturing production line where frozen entrees are produced at 100 per minute. If each entrée had to be removed from the assembly line for manual inspection for food safety issues, this would dramatically impact pace. Instead, the manufacturer installs an automated, high-speed metal detector that can detect, alert, and discard any frozen entrée with metal particles at the speed of the production line. The same approaches work for integrating cybersecurity transparently, seamlessly, and automatically into the DevOps process.”
Chris Carlson, VP Product Management, Qualys
The principle translates directly to CI/CD pipelines: automated security scanning integrated into build and deploy workflows adds minimal latency while catching issues that would otherwise reach production.
How to Implement DevSecOps: Shifting Time, Techniques, and Tools
Carlson recommends starting with an honest assessment of how your organization currently uses three resources — Time, Techniques, and Tools — and then making deliberate shifts in each area.
Shift Time: Find Issues Earlier
Move security activities earlier in the software development lifecycle. For example, identify and fix the use of vulnerable third-party libraries during development rather than discovering them after an application is already in production. This principle is often called shift-left security.
Shift Techniques: Enforce Security in the Pipeline
Change how security decisions are enforced. Automatically fail code check-ins or deployment scripts if an application contains components with known vulnerabilities. This gates vulnerable software from reaching production environments in the first place, rather than relying on post-deployment remediation.
Shift Tools: Reuse What You Already Have
Where possible, use the same tools across both production monitoring and the development and test stages of the pipeline. This approach avoids the cost and knowledge fragmentation that comes from procuring point solutions that only work at a single stage of the DevOps process. Teams gain consistency — the same scanning logic, the same vulnerability taxonomy, and the same remediation workflows — across the full lifecycle.
Key Benefits of DevSecOps
When implemented well, DevSecOps delivers measurable improvements across engineering and security outcomes:
- Reduced cost — fixing vulnerabilities during development is significantly cheaper than remediating them in production.
- Reduced development churn — fewer late-stage security findings mean fewer emergency patches and release rollbacks.
- Reduced application attack surface — continuous security checks keep vulnerable dependencies and misconfigurations from accumulating over time.
- Higher organizational confidence — development, security, and operations teams share ownership of security outcomes rather than pointing fingers across organizational boundaries.
About Chris Carlson
Chris Carlson is Vice President of Product Management at Qualys, where he leads product definition, roadmap, and strategy for the Cloud Agent Platform. He brings more than 20 years of experience in the information security industry, spanning firewalls, VPNs, intrusion prevention systems, real-time event processing, security analytics, and endpoint security platforms. Prior to Qualys, Carlson held security architecture roles at UBS and Booz Allen Hamilton, and product management positions at Hexis Cyber Solutions, Agent Logic, Informatica, and Trustwave.