Over the past 10 years, the idea of combining development and production within IT operations – known as DevOps – has spread throughout the world of IT.

A report by Markets and Markets estimates the global DevOps market growth at up to $10.31 Billion by 2023. The demand for DevOps will be driven by several factors such as lower costs, flexibility, agility, and fast application delivery. Therefore, this opens up significant career opportunities for DevOps engineers in India and worldwide.

The benefits of complementing DevOps with the ITIL framework should not be underestimated: balancing the needs of fast turnaround in software delivery offered by DevOps with the stability in managing IT and digitally-enabled services provided by ITIL.

Abhishek Maitrey, Project Manager at the British Council Shared Service Centre in Noida, India, said: “DevOps as a cross-functional approach fits each part of software development including development build management, testing pre-deployment, release management, configuration management and monitoring. It values collaborative work and increases the frequency and quality of a complete software product.”

The fast delivery of quality products through DevOps practices is, according to Maitrey, making a huge difference to the Indian IT market and playing an important role in the stable growth of industry and business.

Heightened interest in the DevOps movement has led to events such as the DevOps India Summit which – in 2018 – was reputedly the first-ever, large scale DevOps event in the country. Marc Hornbeek – Principal Consultant DevOps with Trace3 and DevOps – speaking in The Economic Times in August this year, ahead of the DevOps India Summit 2019, said: “I see India as the capital for DevOps workforce for the world. DevOps takes a lot of effort, focus for execution and maintenance, but the benefits of DevOps are worth it. For an effective DevOps it is important to have a respectful collaboration of People, Process and Tools.”

He added that DevOps in enterprise is still in its early stages with few “unicorns” and suggested that, in the next five years, there will be an ongoing need for DevOps, with early signs of smarter tools being used to integrate its application with artificial intelligence.

The potential identified for IT in India is clear, while – at the same time – it should be measured with some caution and a recognition that other frameworks, such as ITIL, are there to apply sound governance.

DevOps in MNCs and start-ups

A report from Indian employment technology company, Belong, noted that the Indian DevOps skills base is “concentrated in Bangalore, National Capital Region, Pune, and Hyderabad, comprising 63 percent of the overall talent pool”.

Manu Siddharth Jha writing on the Great Learning website also highlighted India as a destination for global IT multi-national companies (MNCs), with the growth in development centres leading to a boom in DevOps jobs to support technologies such as cloud and artificial intelligence.

Equally, the Indian technology start-up market is notable for its “fast-paced work environment” in which “getting their products out on time will be crucial for their business”, therefore, increasing the demand for DevOps executives to enhance the product delivery process.

Speed, while clearly critical, should not obscure the need in all organizations to maintain a stable, business as usual IT environment.

DevOps and ITIL 4

In a world where a variety of different methods and frameworks are used to manage digital product development and service management, how do they work alongside DevOps?

ITIL, the world’s most widely-adopted framework for IT service management, has now evolved into ITIL 4. Its up-to-date structure and content now make it more applicable to working with and integrating modern and emerging practices such as DevOps and Agile and supporting digital transformation.

Organizations are now recognizing the need to incorporate a range of different approaches to ensure digital transformation and service management success – and ITIL 4 supports those concepts. For example, it provides software development teams with additional capability and terminology to work collaboratively with service teams.

As DevOps harnesses Agile software development methods along with service management techniques, extra value is possible when combining it with ITIL 4. This includes streamlining practices such as change enablement, managing unplanned incidents and investigating how failure has happened.

With ITIL 4’s focus on the co-creation of value through managing digitally-enabled services, the involvement of DevOps supports areas in software product development such as operability, reliability, and maintainability.

And ITIL 4’s Guiding Principles, including Focus on Value and Progress Iteratively with Feedback, blend well with DevOps’ approaches of continual experimentation, taking risks and learning from success and failure.

Abhishek Maitrey – who is also ITIL-certified – adds: “Many organizations are already using DevOps with ITIL across the globe, including India, and we also in the planning phase of managing our services through DevOps.”

India – embracing DevOps

Speaking at the DevOps India summit this year, Marc Hornbeek reportedly said that the Indian IT community had really embraced DevOps and particularly the approach of outsourcing the discipline wholly to work on complete projects rather than segments.

According to Entrepreneur India, he added: “It [DevOps] is a great platform for people to connect and meet people who are willing to learn and ask many important relevant questions. In the near future, DevOps will go through transformation in terms of patterns of practice which will be recognized as high performance that has transformed business.”

And while DevOps is helping Indian IT professionals add extra skills to their core competencies, Maitrey acknowledges that the approach is essentially a culture that organizations have to adapt.

Adopting DevOps and ITIL together means software development and service management progress holistically, and benefit is realized across the entire IT function to achieve greater efficiencies and ensure an organization continues to co-create high value with its stakeholders.

DevSecOps Is a Culture, Not a Job Title or a Tool Purchase

The most important word in any DevSecOps conversation is culture. DevOps and DevSecOps are not roles you can hire for, and they are not products you can purchase and deploy. They represent fundamental shifts in how teams think, communicate, and share responsibility. An organization cannot buy its way into DevSecOps any more than it can buy a winning sports team by acquiring expensive equipment without changing how the players work together.

Organizations that want to sustain innovation and treat security as a first-class priority must commit to the cultural change that DevSecOps demands. That commitment starts at the leadership level and must permeate every team that touches the software delivery pipeline.

Why Security Has Historically Been Siloed

Security has traditionally been viewed as a barrier to velocity. Development teams push for speed; security teams push for controls. Because the two groups often have different goals, different vocabularies, and different incentives, they have historically operated in separate silos. Security reviews were bolted on at the end of a release cycle, creating friction, delays, and resentment on both sides.

This structural separation is precisely the problem DevSecOps aims to solve. When security is involved only at the end — or worse, only after an incident — vulnerabilities compound across the codebase and become far more expensive and disruptive to remediate.

Building the Right Team for DevSecOps Success

A successful DevSecOps initiative requires assembling a cross-functional team that spans development, IT operations, and security. No single group can carry the effort alone. The collaboration must be genuine and ongoing, not performative or limited to scheduled meetings.

Early warning signs that a DevSecOps initiative is struggling include:

• Persistent blame and finger-pointing between development, ops, and security teams.
• Siloed communication where teams share information only when forced to, rather than proactively.
• Lack of shared goals — teams optimizing for their own metrics rather than the organization’s overall security and delivery posture.
• Low enthusiasm for cross-functional work, with individuals resisting collaboration outside their traditional role boundaries.

Addressing these symptoms requires more than a reorganization chart. It requires deliberate investment in shared language, shared tooling, and shared accountability.

Automation and Orchestration as Cultural Enablers

While culture is the foundation, the right tooling accelerates and sustains the cultural shift. Automation is particularly powerful because it removes manual handoffs — one of the most common sources of friction between development and security teams. When vulnerability scanning, policy enforcement, and compliance checks are automated within the CI/CD pipeline, security becomes a continuous background process rather than a disruptive checkpoint.

Orchestration layers that normalize outputs from multiple security scanning tools address a related challenge: different tools classify vulnerabilities differently, produce inconsistent reports, and often require dedicated personnel to interpret results. A unified orchestration approach provides a consolidated, real-time view of application and infrastructure risk, allowing teams to prioritize remediation without context-switching between disparate consoles.

Streamlining Vulnerability Management Without Slowing Delivery

One of the persistent challenges in DevSecOps is that security tooling can inadvertently become a bottleneck. If scanning processes slow down builds, or if security findings are reported without clear prioritization guidance, developers begin to route around the process rather than engage with it.

Effective DevSecOps programs address this by:

• Integrating scanning into existing pipelines so security checks run automatically on every commit, not just at release gates.
• Prioritizing findings by risk rather than flooding developers with undifferentiated vulnerability lists that make triage impossible.
• Providing remediation guidance at the point of finding so developers can act without escalating to the security team for every issue.
• Maintaining continuous visibility across both application code and infrastructure, not just the fraction of the environment covered by point-in-time assessments.

Practical Steps to Get Started

DevSecOps adoption is a journey, not a one-time migration. Organizations that try to transform everything simultaneously typically struggle. A more durable approach:

1. Assess your current state. Understand where security currently sits in your SDLC, where the friction points are, and what tools different teams are already using.
2. Build shared goals and metrics. Align development, operations, and security around common KPIs — mean time to remediate, vulnerability escape rate, deployment frequency — rather than team-specific metrics that incentivize conflict.
3. Start automating in the pipeline. Introduce automated static analysis (SAST) or dependency scanning in CI, and expand incrementally to dynamic analysis (DAST), container scanning, and infrastructure-as-code checks.
4. Foster cross-functional communication. Embed security champions within development teams. Run joint post-mortems on security incidents. Make security knowledge accessible to developers, not proprietary to the security team.
5. Iterate and mature. DevSecOps programs improve over time. Treat security tooling and processes with the same continuous improvement mindset you apply to application code.

The Bottom Line

DevSecOps is moving from a forward-looking aspiration to an operational expectation. The organizations that treat it as a cultural transformation — rather than a tool purchase or an org chart adjustment — are the ones that will build security into their delivery pipeline in a way that actually scales. Formulate a practical plan, execute it incrementally, and hold the entire organization accountable to the shared goal of shipping secure software at speed.

The DevSecOps movement addresses this challenge directly by embedding security practices into every phase of the software development lifecycle. Rather than treating security as a gate at the end of a release cycle, DevSecOps makes it a shared, continuous responsibility. Below are ten concrete tactics that help engineering organisations achieve genuine agile security without sacrificing innovation speed.

1. Change the Mindset of Development and Operations Teams

Developer and operations teams frequently experience security as an obstacle—a layer of approvals and restrictions that slows delivery. Shifting that perception requires early, visible wins. Introduce security tooling that integrates natively into existing developer workflows (IDEs, CI pipelines, pull-request checks) so that secure coding feels like a productivity feature rather than an audit process. When developers see that security catches real bugs before production, the cultural resistance tends to diminish.

2. Introduce a DevSecOps Approach to Security Teams

Security teams operating as a centralised review board create bottlenecks. Repositioning security as an internal service provider—one that supplies guardrails, tools, and rapid guidance rather than sign-off gates—allows product teams to move continuously. Establish dedicated rapid-response capabilities that operate around the clock, and align security roadmaps with product roadmaps so that security capabilities are ready when new features ship, not weeks afterward.

3. Standardise on Core Security Principles

Rather than improvising security decisions sprint by sprint, agree on a small set of non-negotiable principles that every team follows. Three principles that map naturally to a DevSecOps context are:

• API-driven security – security controls are configured and enforced programmatically, not through manual console interactions.
• Security at speed – continuous testing and monitoring replace point-in-time audits.
• Security on-demand – security infrastructure scales dynamically with workloads rather than being provisioned in advance.

Documenting and socialising these principles gives every team a shared reference point and reduces the number of one-off security decisions that generate inconsistency.

4. Adopt API-Driven Security

Traditional security systems that rely on engineers logging into a management console to make changes introduce human error and inconsistency. An API-driven approach treats security configuration as code: policy changes are committed to version control, reviewed through pull requests, and applied automatically via a CI/CD pipeline. The practical benefit is significant—if a firewall rule or access policy needs updating, it is changed in one place, tested, and rolled out uniformly. There are no forgotten console sessions, no environment drift, and no unplanned outages caused by manual misconfigurations.

5. Create a Security Rapid Response Team

Slow incident response turns containable events into major breaches. A dedicated rapid response function—equipped with runbooks, automation, and clear escalation paths—dramatically reduces mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR). Continuous monitoring, automated alerting, and pre-approved response playbooks allow the team to act within minutes rather than hours. Regular tabletop exercises and game days keep skills sharp and expose gaps before a real incident does.

6. Leverage Cloud-Native Security Capabilities

Cloud platforms provide a rich set of native security services—identity and access management, secrets management, network segmentation, logging, and threat detection—that can be composed into a layered security posture. Using these managed services rather than self-hosting equivalent tools means your security posture scales automatically with your infrastructure. It also ensures you are never running unpatched security tooling because the cloud provider handles maintenance. Evaluate native offerings alongside specialist third-party tools to find the combination that best fits your risk model.

7. Deploy a Code-Driven Security Infrastructure

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, or Pulumi make it possible to define security controls—security groups, IAM roles, encryption settings, logging configurations—as versioned, repeatable code. This eliminates the manual, error-prone process of configuring security from scratch each time a new environment is provisioned. It also makes security audits straightforward: reviewers inspect code diffs rather than live environments. Embedding security policy checks (using tools such as Checkov, tfsec, or Open Policy Agent) directly into the IaC pipeline catches misconfigurations before they reach production.

8. Prioritise Visibility and Centralised Management

You cannot secure what you cannot see. End-to-end visibility across cloud accounts, services, and workloads is a prerequisite for agile security. Invest in centralised log aggregation, a unified security information and event management (SIEM) platform, and cloud security posture management (CSPM) tooling that continuously audits resource configurations against your defined policies. Granular visibility into who is deploying what, where, and when allows security teams to act on real data rather than assumptions, and supports the kind of fine-grained cost attribution that prevents overspending on peak-provisioned security infrastructure.

9. Adopt Elasticity and Automation as Security Defaults

A defence-in-depth strategy requires controls at multiple layers: network, host, application, and data. Automating security controls at the host level—using agents that detect anomalous behaviour, enforce least-privilege execution, and can quarantine compromised instances without human intervention—keeps your security posture responsive even at high deployment velocity. Elastic security infrastructure that scales out during high-traffic periods and scales back in during quiet periods ensures that coverage never has a gap and that costs remain proportional to actual usage.

10. Secure Executive Buy-In and Organisational Support

Agile security is a cultural and organisational transformation, not just a technical one. Without visible support from senior leadership, security initiatives stall in the face of competing delivery pressures. Engage decision-makers early by framing security investment in business terms: reduced risk exposure, faster incident recovery, and the ability to ship new features without compliance-related delays. When leadership actively champions agile security—funding tooling, endorsing training, and holding teams accountable—the rest of the organisation follows. Security and delivery speed are not mutually exclusive; with the right foundations, they reinforce each other.

Putting It All Together

Agile security is not a single tool or a one-time project. It is a continuous practice built on shared ownership, programmatic controls, and constant feedback. Start by addressing culture and mindset, establish the three core principles (API-driven, at speed, on-demand), then layer in automation, visibility, and executive support. Organisations that treat security as an integral part of the delivery process—rather than a checkpoint at the end—consistently achieve both faster release cycles and stronger security outcomes.