What is DevSecOps? Security in Your DevOps Pipeline

DevSecOps means integrating automated security tools and practices throughout the entire software development lifecycle, from planning and coding to testing and deployment, rather than treating them as separate tasks. The point of DevSecOps is to implement security best practices while still maintaining increased team productivity by breaking down silos between teams.

DevOps vs. DevSecOps

As speed and automation became central to DevOps, security was often treated as a separate step that slowed the deployment process and potentially introduced vulnerabilities. 

DevSecOps extends DevOps principles by integrating security practices from the start, embedding automated security checks into each stage of the CI/CD pipeline. While DevOps seeks to accelerate development and improve collaboration, DevSecOps ensures that this acceleration doesn’t sacrifice security, making security a shared responsibility across all teams.

DevSecOps vs. Agile

While Agile focuses on delivering software incrementally and adapting quickly to changes, DevSecOps takes a more integrated approach by embedding security within this continuous development process.

In an Agile process, security considerations are often an afterthought or handled separately by a dedicated security team. DevSecOps, on the other hand, seeks to address this by incorporating security testing and compliance checks within each iteration, ensuring that vulnerabilities are identified and mitigated early in the development cycle.

The reason why security should be included from day one is that it helps maximize DevSecOps benefits, such as:

• Reducing risk and legal liability
• Identifying bugs and vulnerabilities earlier in the process
• Making security more manageable

1. Reducing risk and legal liability

Reducing risk and legal liability is not just about avoiding shareholder and customer lawsuits when there’s a costly breach. It’s also about being legally compliant.

Depending on your business and circumstances, you may have to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the European Union law focused on data protection and privacy. You may also have to handle health-related records, which means you may need to comply with HIPAA or other important laws.

Noncompliance could cost your organization dearly in fees.

Having the proper tools and processes in place can help prevent modifications from going out that would result in violations.

It can also help identify compliance violations as the features are created by the development or infrastructure teams, instead of just before direct deployment to production.

2. Identifying bugs and vulnerabilities early in the process

It’s important for issues that can cause vulnerabilities to be caught as early as possible in the DevOps pipeline.

The further into the pipeline you are, the more expensive it is to fix issues (in both monetary and time terms).

With the traditional DevOps process, code or infrastructure changes are committed and pushed to the next phase. The QA team and automated tools receive those changes and start testing, and everyone crosses their fingers that no major issues are found so that everything can get deployed to production on time to meet a deadline.

However, the QA team or automated testing will frequently find problems, including potentially major security issues that require costly rewrites.

The development or infrastructure teams then have to fix the issues as soon as possible because they’re holding up a release. Those teams are under massive pressure to deliver a solution. Once they submit a solution, the QA and security tests start over again.

Security becomes a source of pain and anxiety, and when stakeholders ask why a project is delayed, they’re told that it’s because the security team found issues.

If you shift security left and include it earlier in the process, it becomes integrated into the development process rather than added on later. Those otherwise costly security issues get discovered much faster and closer to the developer or infrastructure engineer so that they can address them before moving on to another task.

Giving Dev and Ops fast feedback on the work they produce means they can be notified immediately and can address the issue before moving on to another task and switching contexts.

3. Making security more manageable

An added benefit of shifting security left is that it helps make security tasks more manageable and natural for development teams.

Security should be handled in the same way. Huge security tests or projects should be broken down into really small tests or projects that happen continuously throughout the DevOps pipeline. Reacting to changes halfway down the deployment pipeline makes this very difficult, whereas being proactive to changes from the outset enables agility.

Implementing DevSecOps involves shifting security left, getting management buy-in, making security part of everyone’s responsibilities, and implementing the proper tools and processes.

Let’s talk more about what the DevSecOps roadmap means and what it looks like.

Shift-left security

We need to include security from the very beginning to make it more impactful without adding excessive friction. The traditional approach has been to plan, develop, and push changes forward before the security team gets involved. 

However, this approach raises many issues:

Issues with the traditional approach to security

One issue is that the security team has limited access to the context. Lack of context results in questions arising that have no easy answers and occur too late in the process:

• Why is this being developed the way that it is?
• Who made that decision?
• Are they aware it will have an impact on other parts of the system?

Another issue is that when the security team finds problems, the pipeline has to go all the way back to the beginning. That causes delays and frustration, especially if the development or infrastructure team has already moved on to another task.

The DevSecOps way of handling security

DevSecOps includes security from the very beginning, so that problems are found as early in the process as possible: closest to the decision makers and to the context.

One way we can do this is by including security team members during planning and then again during product demonstrations in between each development interval. This helps in three ways:

1. It helps the security team understand business goals for the implementation.
2. It involves a team that will be impacted during the development instead of after.
3. The security team can provide guidance and feedback as features get created.

This approach provides security expertise earlier in the development process and means issues are discovered quickly.

Another way we can do this is by tracking open security issues in the same tracking systems that development and operations teams use. The traditional approach has been to keep security issues in separate tracking systems, which means Dev and Ops don’t have visibility (and vice versa). By having all open issues (from Dev, Sec, and Ops) in a central location, everyone can see what the priorities are and collaborate.

If we envision our pipeline going from left to right — left being the starting point and right being production — by moving security to the very beginning, we are shifting security left. That’s why this is often referred to as a “shift-left” security strategy.

Management buy-in

Properly implementing DevSecOps requires a fundamental shift in how your organization thinks about, builds, and deploys software and infrastructure. It requires far more than your peers’ agreement to make a change; it requires management buy-in.

Software vulnerabilities being exploited in production create risks for the organization. The person who judges risks vs. revenue needs to see the value in implementing DevSecOps, or else it will fall flat.

Security should be everyone’s responsibility. For sound security decisions to be made at speed and scale, they simply can’t be centralized.

Management must provide support and implement this practice themselves.

Security is everyone’s responsibility

DevSecOps makes security part of the development process instead of lobbing it over the fence to a security team and forgetting about it.

Instead of encouraging development and infrastructure teams to expect security to address any vulnerabilities in their code or config files, they should be empowered to write more secure code and configurations.

Security is a profession, and highly skilled people are needed for security-focused roles, but everyone else should take responsibility for securing their work.

Again, achieving this requires management buy-in and appropriate metrics.

Security and DevSecOps training

Getting organizational culture right is critical, but it’s not going to happen overnight. Unless you’re already implementing a lot of these concepts, it’s going to require a fundamental shift. There will be resistance, and it will initially cause frustration because you’re changing people’s traditional ways of thinking and working.

Of course, management buy-in will help alleviate these issues, but so will proper training. Management may need to understand these concepts at a high level, but everyone else should do so at a more practical level.

Once everyone understands the DevSecOps approach, they’ll see why it’s important, how to properly implement it, and how it will ultimately help them do their jobs more efficiently.

As mentioned before, there is no single right way to implement DevSecOps. It may be helpful to visualize the lifecycle:

As we can see, many verifications occur before the test or release stages of the lifecycle, in other words, on the left.

Each stage helps us learn and improve before we start a new project, which takes us back to the planning phase.

DevSecOps CI/CD pipeline

Another common way of visualizing and calling this process is CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery/deployment).

Continuous integration makes the plan, code, build, test, and release stages smoother. 

Continuous delivery streamlines the deploy, operate, and monitor stages, so that a team member can press a button to smoothly deploy all of the changes to production. 

Continuous deployment is the same as continuous delivery, except it aims to completely automate deployment. Getting to this point requires a serious amount of trust in your pipeline and is a great goal to strive towards.

As the graphic above shows, we’ve barely scratched the surface. Each stage has a number of actions, processes, and tools we can (and should) implement depending on our needs.

DevSecOps should be applied across the software development lifecycle (SDLC), as it will bring huge benefits, such as reducing the risk of human errors, minimizing downtime, and reducing the potential for attacks and threats.

Let’s take a look at some examples where DevSecOps shines.

Use case 1: Application security

Building applications and keeping them secure are two different things. Whenever you build a new application, you should implement the Security Driven Development (SDD) methodology. Let’s take a look at what you can do to improve your application security:

• Use static application security testing (SAST): By using SAST, you can analyze your source code for vulnerabilities before doing the actual deployments.
• Take advantage of dynamic application security testing (DAST): With DAST, you can run security tests on live applications, making it easy to spot security threats in a real environment.
• Do software composition analysis (SCA): Many applications use open-source libraries, so SCA helps you by checking vulnerabilities in these open-source dependencies.
• Leverage a CI/CD pipeline: Implementing linting, validations, and scanning for vulnerabilities before deploying to a lower-level environment is always a good idea to reduce the threats around your application. Then, use unit and functional tests to ensure your application is working properly.
• Always use lower-level environments – Don’t deploy your application changes directly to the production environment. Use lower environments to ensure that everything is working properly. Mimic production environment traffic to ensure that your application can handle the load.
• Harden your API: Implementing runtime protection by leveraging a Web Application Firewall (WAF) can easily reduce the chances of denial of service (DoS) attacks

Use case 2: Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) security

Infrastructure as code can be secured in several ways:

• Policy as code: Having a policy as code engine, such as Open Policy Agent (OPA), will ensure that your organization can create only certain approved resources with certain parameters. With OPA, you can also require multiple approvals for runs if you are using an infrastructure orchestration platform such as Spacelift.
• IaC security vulnerability scanning: You can detect vulnerabilities that your IaC tools may introduce without deploying the infrastructure first. This is key for keeping your uptime and reducing the chances of threats.
• Drift detection and remediation: By leveraging drift detection, you ensure that your infrastructure state matches the desired state, improving your visibility, reliability, governance, and cost-effectiveness. Read more here to understand the hidden impacts of drift.
• Secrets management: You should avoid hard-coded secrets and static credentials as much as possible. By leveraging Vault, OpenBao, or AWS Secrets Manager, you can build OIDC integrations to these tools and also implement secret rotation, which is helpful even in cases where your secrets are intercepted.
• Self-service templates: By leveraging self-service templates, you can easily ensure that only pre-approved infrastructure templates are deployed. A mechanism that ensures these templates’ reliability reinforces security.
• Use SSO and MFA: Centralize user authentication with SSO and enforce MFA to reduce the risk of compromised credentials.

Use case 3: Pipeline security

Depending on your pipeline use case, you can implement security in multiple ways:

• Security vulnerability scanning: Scan for vulnerabilities before the build and deployment process to identify issues before they are deployed in production.
• Container security: If you are using containers, you should check your images with tools such as Trivy, Clair, or Snyk to prevent vulnerable images from reaching your registries.  
• Secrets management: Rely on secrets management tools to avoid hard-coded secrets.
• Use RBAC: Restrict access to pipelines to those who need it. 
• Secure CI/CD configurations: Implement OS hardening for your runners, and keep them as isolated as possible.

Here are some commonly used DevSecOps tools:

SAST (Static Application Security Testing)

• SonarQube – Detects code vulnerabilities and bugs across multiple languages.
• Checkmarx – Scans source code for security flaws within development workflows.
• Veracode – Provides automated static code analysis to identify weaknesses.

SCA (Software Composition Analysis)

• WhiteSource (Mend) identifies vulnerabilities and license issues in open-source components.
• Snyk finds and fixes vulnerabilities in open-source dependencies and containers.
• Black Duck scans for security risks and compliance in open-source software.

IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing)

• Contrast Security detects vulnerabilities in real time during testing.
• Seeker by Synopsys identifies security flaws by monitoring runtime behavior.
• Hdiv Security provides real-time vulnerability detection during development.

DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing)

• OWASP ZAP is an open-source tool for automated web app vulnerability scanning.
• Burp Suite offers web application security testing, both automated and manual.
• Acunetix scans for web vulnerabilities like SQL injection and XSS.

Check the 73 Most Useful DevOps Tools and 21 Best DevSecOps Tools and Platforms for a full list of DevOps and DevSecOps tools.

Here are five DevSecOps best practices to ensure security is embedded seamlessly throughout the development lifecycle:

• Automate security testing: Integrating automated security tools into the CI/CD pipeline is crucial for catching vulnerabilities early and consistently. By automating code scanning, dependency checks, and compliance validation, teams can detect security issues as soon as they arise, allowing for quicker remediation without slowing down the development pace.
• Shift security left: This means embedding security considerations right from the start of the development process, including during the planning and coding phases. By involving security experts early and encouraging developers to adopt secure coding practices, teams can address potential risks before they escalate rather than scrambling to fix them just before release.
• Implement continuous monitoring: Security isn’t a one-time task; it requires ongoing vigilance. Setting up continuous monitoring for threats, anomalies, and compliance violations helps detect new risks in real time, enabling teams to respond swiftly. This practice extends security beyond the development phase into deployment and operations.
• Foster a security-first culture: Encourage all team members—developers, testers, and operations staff—to take ownership of security. By providing regular security training and fostering a mindset where security is everyone’s responsibility, teams can ensure that security considerations are baked into every stage of the development lifecycle.
• Use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) with secure configurations: Treating infrastructure as code allows for standardized, version-controlled, and automated deployments. Incorporating security best practices in IaC templates helps ensure that all environments are set up securely by default, minimizing configuration drift and reducing the likelihood of insecure settings being introduced.

Spacelift meets all the requirements for the use cases mentioned above. If you want to see in detail what makes Spacelift secure, check out this article.

With Spacelift, you also get:

• Policies to control what kind of resources engineers can create, what parameters they can have, how many approvals you need for a run, what kind of task you execute, what happens when a pull request is open, and where to send your notifications
• Stack dependencies to build multi-infrastructure automation workflows with dependencies, having the ability to build a workflow that, for example, generates your EC2 instances using Terraform and combines it with Ansible to configure them
• Self-service infrastructure via Blueprints, enabling your developers to do what matters — developing application code without sacrificing control
• Creature comforts such as contexts (reusable containers for your environment variables, files, and hooks), and the ability to run arbitrary code
• Drift detection and optional remediation

You can try Spacelift for free by creating a trial account or booking a demo with one of our engineers.

The three pillars of a DevSecOps model are automation, collaboration, and continuous monitoring.

DevSecOps requires properly implemented processes and tools to realize its benefits. 

Getting organizational buy-in and detecting security issues as early in the pipeline as possible are much easier said than done. Plus, there’s not just one right way of achieving DevSecOps. Every organization is different in how it builds and deploys. However, certain concepts can be applied across the board.

A platform like Spacelift can help you and your organization fully manage cloud resources within minutes. Spacelift is a CI/CD platform for infrastructure as code that supports tools like Terraform, Pulumi, Kubernetes, and more. It enables policy as code, which lets you define policies and rules that govern your infrastructure automatically. You can even invite your security and compliance teams to collaborate on and approve certain workflows and policies for parts that require a more manual approach.

To get a head start on these concepts, read Spacelift’s documentation.