This article is adapted from content originally published on Security Boulevard. Making the shift from DevOps to DevSecOps requires better communication, which you can help your teams accomplish with security training and enablement.
The Core Problem: A Failure to Communicate
If DevSecOps isn’t gaining traction in your organization, the root cause is almost always the same: development, security, and operations teams are not talking to each other effectively. Historically, these three groups worked in silos, each frustrated that the others “don’t understand” their constraints or priorities. That frustration is a predictable outcome of isolation—teams that don’t communicate can’t build mutual understanding.
DevSecOps has been evolving for several years, but it is still working its way into mainstream adoption. For organizations that rely on agile CI/CD pipelines to stay competitive, integrating security into the development and operations workflow is no longer optional. It’s a prerequisite for shipping quality software at speed.
The Cultural Shift DevSecOps Demands
True DevSecOps is not simply a matter of adding security scanning tools to a pipeline. It requires a fundamental cultural shift: development, security, and operations stop functioning as adversarial groups and instead operate as different roles on a unified team sharing one goal—produce secure, high-quality software as efficiently as possible.
Enabling that shift starts with communication. And the most practical way to improve communication across these disciplines is cross-training—giving each team enough context to understand what the other teams do, why it matters, and how their work intersects.
Two Tiers of Security Training for DevOps Teams
To bring security more effectively into DevOps, focus on two complementary levels of training:
- Baseline secure coding training for all developers
- A security champions program that develops deeper expertise in select developers
Tier 1: Secure Coding Training for All Developers
The goal of baseline training is not to turn developers into security engineers. It is to ensure that every developer understands that security is a dimension of code quality—and that producing quality code means understanding how applications can be attacked.
Practical starting points for secure coding training include the OWASP Top 10 and the CWE Top 25. These publicly available, community-maintained resources cover the most common and impactful vulnerability classes, including:
- Injection (SQL, command, LDAP, etc.)
- Authentication, authorization, and access control
- Sensitive data exposure
- XML External Entities (XXE)
- Security misconfiguration
- Cross-Site Scripting (XSS)
- Insecure deserialization
- Insufficient logging and monitoring
- Use of components with known vulnerabilities
Training developers to recognize and avoid these vulnerability classes at the point of code authorship is significantly more efficient than discovering and remediating them late in the release cycle.
Tier 2: The Security Champions Program
The security champions model addresses a structural imbalance in many DevOps organizations. Security teams are frequently outnumbered by a wide margin relative to developers—some industry estimates suggest ratios as high as one security professional for every hundred developers, with operations falling somewhere in between. A security team of that size cannot scale to review every commit, threat-model every service, or respond to every developer question in real time.
A security champions program solves this by cultivating security advocates within development teams. The concept rests on a simple communication principle: a peer is more persuasive and more accessible than an outsider. A developer who has received additional security training can answer colleagues’ questions, catch issues during code review, and serve as a bridge to the central security team—in the same language developers use every day.
Critically, a security champions program should be opt-in, not mandatory. The most effective champions are developers who are already curious about security and motivated to deepen their skills. Participating in a champions program should be framed—and genuinely experienced—as a career development opportunity: expanded expertise, greater visibility, and stronger marketability.
Developer Enablement: Shifting Security Left
Training alone is not sufficient if security checks are still deferred to the end of the software development life cycle (SDLC). Late-stage security testing is expensive: defects found after code is integrated, tested, and staged for release require significantly more effort to fix than defects caught during development. The cost—in engineer time, rework, and delayed releases—compounds quickly at scale.
The principle of shifting security left means integrating security activities as early as possible in the SDLC:
- Design phase: Threat modeling to identify attack surfaces before a line of code is written.
- Development phase: Static analysis (SAST) and IDE plugins that flag insecure patterns in real time.
- Build and CI phase: Automated dependency scanning (SCA) and secrets detection integrated into the pipeline.
- Test phase: Dynamic analysis (DAST) and API security testing as part of automated test suites.
- Pre-production: Infrastructure-as-code scanning to catch misconfigured cloud resources before deployment.
When developers are empowered with the training and tooling to find and fix security issues in their own code, the volume of issues escalated to the security team drops significantly. This reduces friction between development and security—one of the most common and damaging sources of organizational conflict in software delivery organizations.
The Guiding Principle: Make the Secure Path the Easy Path
The long-term goal of all of these initiatives—cross-training, secure coding education, security champions, and shift-left tooling—is to make secure behavior the default, lowest-effort path for developers. When secure coding patterns are taught early, championed by peers, and reinforced by automated tooling in the developer’s existing workflow, security stops being a bottleneck and becomes a built-in property of the software.
That is the practical definition of DevSecOps done well: not a separate security gate at the end of a pipeline, but a shared discipline embedded across the entire engineering organization. The outcome is faster delivery of software that is secure by design—not just secure by inspection after the fact.
Getting Started
If your organization is beginning this transition, a practical sequence looks like this:
- Assess current gaps — Survey your development and security teams to understand where communication breaks down and where security knowledge is weakest.
- Launch baseline secure coding training — Use OWASP Top 10 and CWE Top 25 as your curriculum foundation. Prioritize languages and frameworks your teams actually use.
- Identify and recruit security champion candidates — Look for developers who already engage with security topics, ask security-related questions, or have relevant backgrounds.
- Define the champions program structure — Clarify time commitments, training resources, recognition, and the champions’ ongoing relationship with the central security team.
- Integrate security tooling into CI/CD — Start with high-signal, low-noise tools that fit existing workflows. Avoid overwhelming developers with false positives early in the program.
- Measure and iterate — Track metrics such as mean time to remediate vulnerabilities, the ratio of issues caught in development versus production, and developer satisfaction with security tooling.
Building a DevSecOps culture is a gradual process, not a one-time project. Progress is measured in consistent incremental improvements to communication, capability, and tooling—not in a single organizational restructure.