The solution is not to slow down delivery — it’s to move security earlier in the process. Rather than discovering vulnerabilities after deployment, treat every security flaw as a first-class defect inside your DevOps workflow. This approach is the foundation of DevSecOps.

What Is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps integrates security practices directly into the DevOps pipeline — at the planning, coding, building, testing, and deployment stages — rather than treating security as a gate at the end of the release cycle. The goal is to identify and remediate vulnerabilities at the same pace that new code is written.

Inline vs. Out-of-Band Security Activities

Not every security activity can be automated into a pipeline. Understanding the difference between what can run automatically and what requires human expertise is essential to designing a realistic DevSecOps strategy.

Inline Activities

Inline activities are fully automated and can run inside a CI/CD pipeline without human intervention. Examples include:

• Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Analyzes source code for vulnerabilities before the application runs.
• Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST): Tests a running application for vulnerabilities by simulating external attacks.
• Software Composition Analysis (SCA) / Open Source Management: Identifies known vulnerabilities in third-party and open-source dependencies.

Out-of-Band Activities

Out-of-band activities cannot be fully automated. They require human judgment and expertise. Examples include:

• Architecture Risk Analysis (ARA): Identifies technical risks arising from design-level flaws in a system’s architecture.
• Threat Modeling: Maps out the attack surface of a system to identify and prioritize potential threats.
• Manual Code Review: Human review of source code for logic errors, business-logic vulnerabilities, and subtle security flaws that automated tools miss.

While most inline activities can also be performed out-of-band when needed, the reverse is not true — there is currently no reliable way to fully automate architecture risk analysis or manual code review. Both require human expertise to be meaningful.

Security Must Be Treated Like Quality

Security issues should carry the same weight as functional quality requirements. Just as a CI/CD pipeline should break the build when unit tests fail or code doesn’t compile, it should also break when security thresholds are crossed. A broken build triggers notifications and, depending on the nature of the failure, may kick off out-of-band activities such as threat modeling or a manual code review.

“It’s important to have the capability to break the build when security issues arise. Developers need solutions and capabilities that identify and flag the problem early so that a timely fix can be introduced without delay.”

Olli Jarva, Senior Solutions Architect, Synopsys Singapore

When to Break the Build for Security

The first practical step is defining the rule sets that will break a build. Only inline (automated) activities can break the build — out-of-band activities, by definition, are manual and cannot block a pipeline automatically. Common criteria for breaking a build include:

1. Exceeding a configured threshold for critical-severity vulnerabilities.
2. Exceeding a configured threshold for high-severity vulnerabilities.
3. Detecting a specific high-risk vulnerability class, such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting (XSS).
4. Identifying a zero-day or publicly disclosed vulnerability in a dependency (e.g., a critical Apache Struts issue detected by an SCA tool).
5. SAST scan results showing that one or more source files failed to compile, which significantly reduces confidence in the completeness and accuracy of the scan.
6. SAST or DAST tools running out of memory, which can produce incomplete or unreliable results.

This list is not exhaustive, but it provides a solid baseline. The overall goal is to prevent insecure code from quietly passing through the pipeline and reaching production.

Team Responsibilities in a DevSecOps Pipeline

Embedding security into CI/CD requires coordination across three teams. Each has a distinct role:

Security Team

• Select, configure, and integrate security tools into the build pipeline.
• Define the rules and thresholds that trigger a broken build.
• Maintain a dynamic record of outstanding security defects and their remediation status.

DevOps Team

• Assist the security team in implementing build-breaking logic within pipeline infrastructure.
• Notify development teams when a build breaks and provide clear context about the specific reason.

Development Team

• Respond to broken builds by investigating and remediating the identified security issues.
• Treat security defects with the same urgency as functional bugs.

Key Takeaways

• DevSecOps shifts security left — catching vulnerabilities earlier, when they are cheapest to fix.
• Automated inline security tools (SAST, DAST, SCA) should be wired directly into your CI/CD pipeline.
• Human-driven out-of-band activities (ARA, threat modeling, manual code review) complement automation but cannot replace it.
• Build-breaking rules for security issues must be deliberately defined, not left to defaults.
• Security, DevOps, and development teams must share ownership of the pipeline’s security posture.

Security is too important to treat as an afterthought. By integrating it directly into the CI/CD pipeline — and empowering every team to take ownership — organizations can move fast without sacrificing the safety of their applications and infrastructure.

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.

The Security Gap in Fast-Moving DevOps Pipelines

DevOps has moved well beyond the experimental stage. For most organizations, it is now the default model for application development and delivery—breaking down silos between developers and IT operations and accelerating release cycles significantly. But that same velocity creates a dangerous blind spot: when security teams are not embedded in the process from the start, vulnerabilities get baked into products before anyone notices.

The challenge is not a lack of awareness. It is a matter of culture, timing, and tooling. Bolting security on after the fact is expensive, disruptive, and increasingly untenable as organizations scale their DevOps practices.

What the Data Says: The DigiCert 2017 Survey

In May 2017, DigiCert commissioned a survey of 300 senior management executives across IT, DevOps, and Security functions. All respondents came from organizations that had already adopted a DevOps posture—spanning small, medium, and large enterprises. The results paint a clear picture of both the urgency and the difficulty of integrating security into DevOps.

• 98% of enterprises surveyed had made integrating security teams into their DevOps methodology a stated priority.
• Approximately 49% reported they were actively working on the integration.
• Another 49% reported they had already completed it.
• 88% said integrating security without slowing the development process was somewhat to extremely important.

The near-universal consensus signals that the industry has crossed a tipping point. Security integration is no longer a “nice to have”—it is an operational expectation.

The Cost of Getting It Wrong

Respondents were clear about what happens when security is left out of the DevOps loop:

• 78% cited increased costs as a consequence of poor security integration.
• 73% cited slower application delivery.
• 71% cited increased security risks.

Addressing a vulnerability after an application ships grinds the development process to a halt. Engineering time is redirected, release schedules slip, and remediation costs compound. The irony is that the speed DevOps is meant to deliver evaporates the moment a post-release security incident occurs.

“The security team was adamant from the get-go that DevOps included security. They wanted to make sure that every angle of attack, every potential vector, every potential risk could be thought of ahead of time to minimize the potential for patient data to be exposed publicly.”

— IT Manager, large healthcare provider (survey respondent)

The Payoff When Integration Works

Organizations that had completed the integration reported measurable advantages over those still in progress:

• 22% more likely to report doing well with information security.
• 21% more likely to report meeting application delivery deadlines.
• 21% more likely to report lower application risk.

These figures reinforce the core argument: agility and security are not mutually exclusive. Done correctly, embedding security into DevOps improves both dimensions simultaneously.

Why the Transition Is Hard

Despite high intent, many organizations struggle to make integration real. Survey respondents identified several recurring obstacles:

• The process takes too long to show results.
• Security teams are resistant to changing established workflows.
• There is often no single person with both the technical credibility and the interpersonal skills to bridge cultural divides between teams.

This is a fundamentally human problem as much as a technical one. Tooling can automate a lot, but it cannot resolve the friction that emerges when development velocity norms collide with security gatekeeping norms.

Four Best Practices for Successful DevSecOps Integration

The DigiCert survey identified four practices consistently associated with successful security integration. These are not aspirational ideals—they reflect what organizations that completed the transition actually did.

1. Appoint a Social Leader

Identify one person whose explicit role is to drive cultural change. This person should clearly define the responsibilities of IT, Security, and DevOps roles, and act as the relationship bridge across all three functions. Without this kind of designated champion, integration efforts tend to stall in committee or collapse under competing priorities.

2. Bring Security to the Table from Day One

Place a security lead on every DevOps initiative and involve them at the project kickoff—not at the review stage. Practical steps include limiting access privileges from the start and implementing automated Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) to enforce signing and encryption across all network communications.

3. Invest in Automation

Manual security checks are a bottleneck in fast-moving pipelines. Automate baseline security practices directly into the DevOps workflow, including:

• Certificate lifecycle management
• Automated patching
• Vulnerability scanning
• Static code analysis (SAST)

When security checks run automatically in the CI/CD pipeline, they no longer depend on a human remembering to run them—and they no longer slow down developers waiting for a security sign-off.

4. Integrate and Standardize

Implement controls around standard security processes and integrate them with server configuration management and orchestration platforms. The goal is automated, consistent security enforcement that operates behind the scenes—invisible to developers during normal work, but reliably enforced at every step.

The Bottom Line: DevSecOps Is the Standard, Not the Exception

The transition from DevOps to DevSecOps—where security is a shared responsibility embedded throughout the software delivery lifecycle—is no longer optional for organizations operating at scale. The DigiCert survey data makes the business case plainly: enterprises that complete this integration report better security outcomes and better delivery performance. The two goals reinforce each other when the integration is done well.

The path forward requires both cultural leadership and technical investment. Identify your social leader, automate what can be automated, standardize what should be standardized, and involve security from the first line of a project—not the last.

Why Security Can’t Stay Siloed

Imagine a world where product owners, Development, QA, IT Operations, and Infosec work together—not only to help each other, but to ensure the overall organization succeeds. By working toward a common goal, they enable a fast flow of planned work into production while achieving world-class stability, reliability, availability, and security.

In that world, Infosec continuously reduces friction, creating systems that let developers be more productive while encoding security knowledge into shared tooling. Small teams can then deploy safely, securely, and quickly—without waiting on a separate security gate at the end of the release cycle.

The goal is straightforward: instead of inspecting security into a product at the very end of the process, integrate security controls into the daily work of Development and Operations so that security is part of everyone’s job, every day.

The Force-Multiplication Problem

DevOps emerged partly because there weren’t enough Operations engineers to handle the deployment volume generated by growing development teams. The staffing gap in Infosec is even more severe. Security practitioner James Wickett described it this way:

“The ratio of engineers in Development, Operations, and Infosec in a typical technology organization is 100:10:1. When Infosec is that outnumbered, without automation and integrating information security into the daily work of Dev and Ops, Infosec can only do compliance checking—which is the opposite of security engineering—and besides, it also makes everyone hate us.”

James Wickett

Automation and cultural integration are therefore not nice-to-haves—they are the only realistic path to meaningful security at scale.

Ten Practical Tips

1. Invite Infosec to Development Iteration Demos

One of the simplest ways to prevent Infosec from becoming a blocker at release time is to include security engineers in sprint or iteration demos. Seeing work-in-progress gives them the opportunity to flag risks and offer guidance while corrections are still inexpensive. It also helps security understand team goals in business context, rather than encountering features for the first time during a final audit.

2. Track Security Work in the Same Systems as Dev and Ops

Security work that lives in a separate backlog is invisible to the teams who need to act on it. Add Infosec tasks, vulnerabilities, and remediation items to the same work-tracking system—Jira, Azure Boards, Linear, or whichever tool the team already uses. When security work competes for priority alongside feature work and operational tasks, it gets treated with the same urgency.

3. Include Infosec in Blameless Post-Mortems

Post-mortems are standard practice after operational incidents; the same discipline should apply to security incidents. Nick Galbreath, who led Information Security at Etsy, described their approach: security issues were filed in Jira alongside all other engineering work, classified as P1 (fix immediately) or P2 (fix by end of week), regardless of whether the affected application was customer-facing. The blameless format surfaces systemic causes rather than assigning individual blame—making it easier to fix root causes and prevent recurrence.

4. Embed Security Controls into Shared Repositories and Services

A shared source code repository is more than a place to store code—it is a vehicle for distributing organizational knowledge. Security teams should contribute approved libraries, hardened base images, infrastructure-as-code templates, and configuration standards to the same repositories developers use daily. When secure building blocks are the easiest option to reach for, developers choose them naturally. Storing security artifacts in version control also makes it easy to audit what changed and when.

5. Integrate Security Tests into the Deployment Pipeline

Static application security testing (SAST), dependency vulnerability scanning, secrets detection, and other automated checks should run on every commit alongside unit tests, integration tests, and linting. Fast, automated feedback keeps security concerns visible to the developer at the moment they are most able to act—immediately after writing code. Aim to fail the build on high-severity findings so that security issues can never silently accumulate.

6. Protect the Deployment Pipeline Itself from Malicious Code

CI/CD infrastructure is an attractive target. Malicious code injected into a build server or unit-test suite runs with the trust level of your pipeline—potentially touching secrets, credentials, and production systems. Mitigate this risk by:

• Hardening CI/CD servers and reproducing them from version-controlled, automated builds so that any tampering is detectable.
• Reviewing all changes introduced into version control before allowing the CI server to execute them, especially from external contributors.
• Instrumenting the repository to detect when test code contains suspicious API calls, network requests, or credential access patterns.
• Applying least-privilege access to build agents so a compromised job cannot reach unrelated systems.

7. Automate Application Security Testing

Development tests typically verify that code does what it is supposed to do. Security testing asks the complementary question: what can an attacker make it do that it was not supposed to do? Convert manual security test cases—input validation checks, authentication boundary tests, access-control verifications—into automated unit or functional tests that run continuously in the pipeline. Supplement this with developer-facing design patterns that prevent common abuses: rate limiting on APIs, idempotent form submissions, and clear error messages that don’t leak internal state.

8. Secure the Software Supply Chain

Modern applications are assembled largely from third-party and open source components. Each dependency is a potential attack surface. Establish a process to continuously scan dependencies for known vulnerabilities—tools exist for most major package ecosystems—and define a policy for how quickly critical vulnerabilities must be patched. Prefer components with a track record of timely security fixes and active maintenance. Consider generating a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for each release so you can respond quickly when a new vulnerability is disclosed in a library you depend on.

9. Harden and Continuously Validate Your Environments

Hardened environments reduce the blast radius of any successful attack. Treat environment configuration—operating system settings, database permissions, TLS parameters, firewall rules—as code, and write automated tests that verify hardening benchmarks (such as CIS Benchmarks) are in place and have not drifted. Run vulnerability scanners against all environments on a scheduled basis and include the results in the same dashboards that Dev and Ops monitor. Drift from a known-good baseline should generate an alert, not a quarterly audit finding.

10. Integrate Security Telemetry into Shared Observability Tools

Security teams that operate separate, siloed monitoring systems create blind spots. Integrate security signals—authentication failures, privilege escalations, unusual API call volumes, access to sensitive data—into the same dashboards, alerting systems, and log aggregation platforms that Development, QA, and Operations already use. When everyone can see anomalous behavior in context alongside application performance data, the organization can detect and respond to breaches far more quickly than when security telemetry is examined only by a small, overburdened team.

Putting It All Together

None of these tips require a major organizational restructuring to get started. Most can be introduced incrementally—invite a security engineer to the next sprint demo, add a dependency scanner to the pipeline this week, move the next security bug into the main Jira board. The cumulative effect is a system of work in which security is not a late-stage gate that slows delivery, but a continuous property of the way software is built and operated.

The teams that do this well report faster delivery, fewer late-stage surprises, and—critically—security engineers who are seen as enablers rather than obstacles.