DevSecOps in 2025: Principles, Technologies, and Best Practices

What Is DevSecOps? 

DevSecOps stands for Development, Security, and Operations. It integrates security into every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), emphasizing "shifting security left" by building security practices into the development process rather than treating it as an afterthought. It fosters a culture of shared responsibility, automation, continuous monitoring, and collaboration among development, security, and operations teams to identify and fix vulnerabilities faster and more cost-effectively.

Key principles and practices of DevSecOps include:

• Shift-left security: Security is integrated into the earliest phases of development, rather than being addressed at the end of the process. 
• Automation: Security testing, checks, and controls are automated and integrated into the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline. 
• Collaboration: Developers, security professionals, and operations teams work together closely to build secure applications. 
• Continuous monitoring: Security teams continuously monitor systems and applications for vulnerabilities and threats. 
• Compliance and governance: Security protocols and audits are built into the workflow and automated to ensure adherence to industry standards.

Comparing DevSecOps to Related Methodologies

DevSecOps vs. DevOps

DevOps focuses primarily on collaboration between development and operations teams with the goal of streamlining software delivery and improving operational efficiency. It aims to automate processes, standardize environments, and accelerate code releases through practices like continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). While DevOps improves deployment speeds and system reliability, it often treats security as a separate or downstream process, which can result in vulnerabilities being discovered late in the development cycle.

DevSecOps builds upon DevOps by weaving security directly into the CI/CD workflows and all development activities. Security is not an afterthought, nor is it just the responsibility of dedicated security teams. Developers, operations staff, and security specialists work together, using automation and integrated toolchains to promptly identify and remediate vulnerabilities. This ensures that security becomes a continuous, built-in process, minimizing risk without sacrificing the agility and speed of traditional DevOps.

DevSecOps vs. SecDevOps

DevSecOps and SecDevOps are terms often used interchangeably, but their order reflects a subtle emphasis in organizational priorities: 

• DevSecOps puts development first, followed by security and operations. This highlights the integration of security into a developer-driven process. 
• SecDevOps leads with security, indicating an initial focus on secure design and architecture, followed by development and operations.

In practice, the differences are marginal, as both aim for the same outcome: security by design, integrated throughout the SDLC. The distinction is mostly semantic, influenced by team culture or project goals. However, the preferred term often reflects where organizations see their primary area of focus—either embedding security within existing DevOps workflows (DevSecOps) or leading with security as the founding principle (SecDevOps).

Core Principles of DevSecOps 

1. Shift-Left Security

Shift-left security is about moving security practices earlier in the software development lifecycle. Rather than waiting until code is ready for production, organizations build secure coding, threat modeling, and vulnerability scanning into earlier stages such as planning, development, and testing. 

This approach enables teams to find issues when they are less expensive and simpler to fix, resulting in fewer delays and higher software quality. By shifting left, developers are empowered to make security-conscious decisions from the onset. They are equipped with automated tools and standardized processes that integrate with their workflows. Early intervention reduces remediation costs, shortens feedback loops, and fosters a proactive security culture.

2. Automation

Automation is a cornerstone of DevSecOps, enabling teams to scale security processes without sacrificing delivery speed. Automated security tools are integrated into CI/CD pipelines to run static and dynamic analysis, compliance checks, and vulnerability assessments. These automated checks occur at every step, so vulnerabilities are flagged immediately and automatically, preventing faulty or insecure code from progressing further down the pipeline. 

Using automation ensures consistency and reduces the dependence on manual reviews, which can be error-prone and time-consuming. It also provides rapid, actionable feedback to developers, allowing them to fix issues in near real-time. The breadth of automation—from code scanning to infrastructure compliance—ensures that security is woven into the pipeline and not bolted on as an afterthought.

3. Collaboration

Collaboration between development, operations, and security teams is essential for successful DevSecOps adoption. Breaking down silos helps ensure that security concerns are shared and addressed collectively, rather than left to specialized teams after the fact. 

Joint ownership and open communication create a culture where everyone is accountable for building secure systems. This collaborative culture is reinforced by shared tools, transparent processes, and cross-functional training. Teams work together to prioritize risks, establish guidelines, and make security a part of daily workflows. This cohesion reduces friction, encourages proactive issue resolution, and ultimately leads to more resilient software outcomes.

4. Continuous Monitoring

Continuous monitoring involves observing applications and infrastructure for security threats, misconfigurations, and policy violations throughout their lifecycle. Instead of relying on periodic assessments or manual spot checks, organizations employ tooling to continuously scan for anomalies and vulnerabilities in real-time. This allows teams to detect and react to incidents as they arise, rather than discovering them long after deployment. 

Effective continuous monitoring leverages both automated and manual processes. Security dashboards, alerting systems, and orchestration tools ensure that critical information is surfaced promptly. Teams can then respond quickly to security events, update configurations, and patch vulnerabilities before they are exploited, thus minimizing the attack surface and maintaining compliance.

5. Compliance and Governance

Compliance and governance are integrated throughout the DevSecOps process to ensure that all software and infrastructure meet organizational and regulatory requirements. Automated tools can validate policy adherence, flag deviations, and generate audit trails, making compliance part of the daily workflow instead of a disruptive periodic event. This reduces the risk of non-compliance and associated penalties. 

Embedding governance practices improves traceability of changes and simplifies both internal and external audits. Automated controls enforce security baselines and provide documentation for regulatory reviews. By making compliance visible and actionable, DevSecOps ensures that security standards are not just met but maintained continuously, supporting both business needs and legal obligations.

Related content: Read our guide to secure software development lifecycle

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Benefits of DevSecOps 

Integrating security into every stage of the development lifecycle offers significant advantages for teams and organizations. By making security a shared responsibility and automating it across the pipeline, DevSecOps enhances both the speed and safety of software delivery. 

Key benefits include:

• Early detection of vulnerabilities: Security flaws are identified in the early stages of development, making them cheaper and easier to fix. This reduces technical debt and limits the risk of introducing exploitable bugs into production.
  
  
• Faster incident response: Continuous monitoring and automated alerting enable teams to detect, triage, and remediate threats quickly, minimizing downtime and potential damage.
  
  
• Improved compliance posture: DevSecOps embeds policy checks and audit mechanisms into the pipeline, ensuring adherence to regulatory requirements without slowing down delivery.
  
  
• Increased deployment velocity: By automating security tasks and integrating them into CI/CD workflows, teams can maintain rapid release cycles without compromising security.
  
  
• Reduced costs over time: Proactive security practices and early intervention significantly lower the cost of remediation, breach recovery, and compliance violations.
  
  
• Stronger security culture: Encouraging collaboration across functions fosters a security-aware mindset throughout the organization, resulting in better security decisions at all levels.
  

Better quality software: Embedding security in testing and review processes leads to more resilient applications, improving user trust and system reliability.

Key DevSecOps Tool Categories

CI/CD Platforms with Embedded Security

Modern CI/CD platforms increasingly offer built-in security features, enabling teams to integrate security scanning, policy checks, and compliance rules directly into their deployment pipelines. This reduces reliance on standalone security tools, providing developers and operations teams with real-time feedback and actionable insights within their familiar toolchains. As a result, security checks become a part of each commit, build, and deployment. 

Security-enabled CI/CD platforms can run automated tests, scan container images, enforce access controls, and validate infrastructure configurations. An embedded approach reduces complexity, ensures consistent application of policies, and accelerates vulnerability remediation across all new code and releases.

Static Application Security Testing (SAST)

SAST tools examine source code, bytecode, or binary code for security vulnerabilities before an application is run. They identify issues such as injection flaws, buffer overflows, and credential leaks early in the SDLC, often as part of the commit or pull request process. Integrating SAST in CI/CD enables developers to receive real-time alerts about coding errors and bad security practices. 

By offering actionable feedback at the code level, SAST reduces the likelihood of security flaws making it into production. These tools can be configured to enforce organizational coding standards and compliance rules. They support quick iterations by providing developers with the information needed to make fixes as the code evolves, promoting secure programming habits.

Software Composition Analysis (SCA) / Dependency Scanning

SCA tools scan applications for known vulnerabilities in third-party libraries, frameworks, and open source dependencies. With the rising use of external components, dependency scanning is critical for identifying and managing supply chain risks. These tools continuously monitor codebases for risky packages or outdated libraries and provide remediation advice. 

By automating dependency tracking and vulnerability alerts, SCA empowers teams to keep dependencies up to date and minimizes exposure to attacks stemming from external code. Integration with CI/CD processes ensures teams are notified of risks as soon as new vulnerabilities are discovered in the ecosystem, allowing proactive patching and documentation.

Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST)

DAST tools test running applications in real-world conditions to find vulnerabilities missed by static analysis. They interact with the application much like an attacker would, probing web interfaces, APIs, or backend services for common flaws such as cross-site scripting, broken authentication, and misconfigurations. Because DAST operates on fully built environments, it helps ensure production systems are robust and secure. 

These tools can be scheduled to run after deployment or even on a regular cadence in staging environments. Integrating DAST into CI/CD ensures that dynamic security checks become part of the release process, catching runtime issues before public exposure. Their findings give developers and security teams valuable insights for hardening applications against exploits.

Cloud Application Detection and Response (CADR)

Cloud application detection and response (CADR) tools extend monitoring into the application and workload layers, providing visibility into runtime behavior and detecting malicious activity as it occurs. Unlike pre-release testing, CADR solutions analyze live traffic, API calls, and system interactions to identify threats such as privilege escalation, code injection attempts, or supply chain attacks. They generate detailed telemetry that helps security teams correlate anomalous activity with specific application components, enabling faster diagnosis of the root cause.

CADR integrates closely with ASPM and SIEM/SOAR platforms, feeding enriched application and workload-level data into broader vulnerability management, incident detection, and response workflows. Automated response capabilities, such as blocking malicious function calls help reduce exposure windows. By continuously monitoring deployed applications, CADR adds a protective layer that complements static and dynamic testing, ensuring security threats are detected and contained before they escalate into full-scale incidents.

Container and IaC Security

Container security tools and infrastructure as code (IaC) scanning help safeguard modern cloud-native applications. These tools analyze container images, Dockerfiles, Kubernetes manifests, and IaC scripts for vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance errors. Automated scanning and policy enforcement prevent insecure artifacts from being used in deployments. 

By integrating with existing CI/CD workflows, these tools provide instant feedback to developers as they author infrastructure or container specs. Cloud-native environments are thus kept secure from the build phase onward. Solutions like Trivy are common in this space, supporting multi-cloud and hybrid cloud contexts.

Secrets Management

Secrets management tools securely store and control access to sensitive information like API keys, passwords, certificates, and encryption tokens. By centralizing secrets and removing them from codebases, these tools help prevent leaks and unauthorized access. Integration with deployment pipelines allows credentials to be injected only at runtime, reducing the attack surface. 

Vendors such as HashiCorp Vault, AWS Secrets Manager, and Azure Key Vault provide granular controls and audit trails. Secrets management aligns with compliance requirements by enforcing policies on access, rotation, and expiration. Automated handling of secrets also reduces the likelihood of accidental exposure in public repositories or logs.

Cloud and Runtime Policy Enforcement

Cloud and runtime policy enforcement tools monitor live environments to enforce compliance, security configuration, and operational policies. They continuously check cloud resources, containers, networks, and workloads for policy violations and provide real-time alerts or auto-remediation. This ensures that drift from organizational or regulatory standards is detected immediately, not after the fact. 

These solutions integrate with cloud APIs and orchestrators, enabling organizations to apply consistent controls across platforms and geographies. Automated enforcement reduces manual overhead and ensures that non-compliance is addressed without delay. Tools like AWS Config, Azure Policy, and Open Policy Agent facilitate centralized, scalable enforcement of security best practices at runtime.

DevSecOps Challenges 

Here are some of the key challenges organizations face as they implement DevSecOps processes.

Tooling Complexity

Adopting DevSecOps often introduces a wide range of tools for code scanning, dependency analysis, container security, secrets management, and runtime monitoring. While each tool addresses specific needs, managing them together can create overlap, integration challenges, and high operational overhead. 

Teams may struggle to connect tools into a unified workflow, leading to gaps in coverage or duplicated effort. Tool sprawl also makes it harder to maintain consistent policies across environments. Organizations need to prioritize interoperability, standardize tooling choices, and use orchestration platforms that centralize visibility and automate integrations to reduce complexity.

Skill Gaps

Successful DevSecOps requires developers to understand security principles, operations staff to be familiar with development practices, and security professionals to adapt to automated, fast-paced workflows. Many teams lack the cross-disciplinary skills needed to bridge these areas, slowing adoption and increasing reliance on specialists. 

Without proper training, developers may overlook security issues. Organizations need to invest in continuous learning, provide hands-on training with integrated tools, and promote shared accountability across roles. Building a workforce with hybrid skill sets is essential to sustaining DevSecOps practices.

Balancing Speed and Security

One of the biggest challenges in DevSecOps is maintaining the rapid delivery pace promised by DevOps while embedding thorough security checks. Overly strict or slow security processes can delay releases and frustrate developers, while lightweight checks may fail to catch critical issues. 

Striking the right balance requires using automation to reduce friction, prioritizing vulnerabilities based on risk, and tailoring controls to the criticality of the application. Teams must also adjust their pipelines so that security gates enforce standards without unnecessarily blocking progress, allowing organizations to achieve both agility and resilience.

Alert Fatigue

Automated security tools often generate large volumes of alerts, many of which are false positives or low-priority findings. This can overwhelm teams, causing important issues to be overlooked or delayed. Developers may begin to ignore alerts altogether if they perceive them as noise. 

To reduce alert fatigue, organizations must fine-tune detection rules, prioritize alerts based on business impact, and integrate findings into existing workflows such as issue trackers. Correlating data across multiple tools can also help surface only the most relevant issues. Effective alert management ensures that teams focus their attention on vulnerabilities that matter most, improving security outcomes without burdening productivity.

Essential DevSecOps Best Practices

Here are a few ways your organization can ensure a DevSecOps program is a success.

1. Integrate Threat Modeling Early

Threat modeling ensures that systems are designed with security in mind from the start. By analyzing data flows, trust boundaries, and attack surfaces during the design phase, teams can identify risks before they become costly to address. Frameworks like STRIDE or PASTA help structure this process by providing consistent categories of threats to evaluate. For example, modeling may highlight that sensitive data passes between microservices, prompting early adoption of encryption-in-transit and strict authentication.

Integrating threat modeling into design reviews fosters collaboration across developers, operations staff, and security experts. Workshops and tooling such as OWASP Threat Dragon or Microsoft’s Threat Modeling Tool help teams visualize attack vectors and document countermeasures. Revisiting the threat model at each major release ensures that new features and architecture changes are evaluated for risks. This early and ongoing analysis leads to security-conscious design choices and reduces reliance on costly post-deployment fixes.

2. Adopt Secure Coding Standards

Secure coding standards define a baseline of practices that reduce the risk of common vulnerabilities like SQL injection, buffer overflows, or insecure authentication. These standards are drawn from frameworks such as OWASP, CERT, or industry-specific guidelines, and they ensure consistency across teams. Developers are trained to follow these practices, and automated tools like linters and SAST scanners enforce them within the development workflow. By codifying expectations, teams prevent insecure patterns from being introduced in the first place.

The effectiveness of coding standards depends on both education and automation. Developers need to understand not only the rules but also why they exist—such as how parameterized queries prevent injection attacks or why error messages must avoid leaking system details. Tooling ensures compliance at scale by flagging violations and blocking risky commits. Over time, consistent use of secure coding standards improves software quality, reduces security incidents, and strengthens developer habits that persist across projects.

3. Continuously Monitor Third-Party Dependencies

Modern applications rely heavily on external libraries and frameworks, which introduce supply chain risks outside of direct developer control. Vulnerabilities in widely used dependencies—such as Log4j—can expose entire ecosystems to attack. Monitoring dependencies with software composition analysis (SCA) tools ensures that vulnerabilities are flagged quickly.

Monitoring extends beyond patching. Teams enforce policies to block the use of unmaintained or high-risk packages, pin dependency versions to avoid unexpected changes, and validate artifact integrity with signatures or checksums. Automated pipelines can even open pull requests with patched versions as soon as fixes are available. By integrating dependency scanning into CI/CD workflows, organizations gain continuous visibility into their software supply chain and reduce exposure to inherited risks.

4. Establish Governance, Metrics and Continuous Risk Alignment

Governance ensures DevSecOps practices remain consistent and measurable across teams. This starts with defining clear policies for code quality, access control, vulnerability management, and compliance. Policies should be codified as automated controls in pipelines, preventing subjective or ad hoc enforcement. For example, build pipelines can enforce minimum SAST/DAST thresholds or block deployments that include critical CVEs in dependencies.

Metrics are equally important for tracking progress and maintaining accountability. Teams should monitor indicators like vulnerability remediation time, number of security defects per release, compliance audit pass rates, and mean time to detect/respond (MTTD/MTTR). Dashboards that surface these metrics to both engineers and leadership ensure alignment between day-to-day security activities and organizational risk posture. Regular reviews of metrics enable teams to identify gaps, recalibrate priorities, and demonstrate measurable improvement in security maturity.

5. Ensure Secrets Are Handled Securely

Secrets must never be stored in code repositories, configuration files, or container images. Instead, organizations should use dedicated secrets management systems that provide secure storage, fine-grained access controls, and automated rotation. Pipelines should retrieve secrets only at runtime, ensuring they are never exposed to developers directly. Role-based access ensures that only authorized services or individuals can retrieve specific credentials.

Automated expiration and rotation policies further reduce exposure risks. For example, database passwords can be rotated every 30 days, API tokens can be time-limited, and certificates can be renewed automatically before expiration. Integrating secret management into CI/CD pipelines allows deployments to remain seamless while ensuring sensitive information is properly protected. Logs should be sanitized to prevent accidental leaks of credentials during builds or runtime.

6. Empower with Security Training and Combat Alert Fatigue

Training equips developers and operations teams to recognize and address security issues without relying solely on dedicated specialists. Regular workshops, capture-the-flag exercises, and secure coding bootcamps help build practical skills. Embedding “just-in-time” training within developer workflows—such as links to remediation guidance when a SAST tool flags an issue—reinforces best practices at the point of need. Over time, this creates a culture where security is an expected part of software craftsmanship.

To reduce alert fatigue, organizations should prioritize tuning tools and consolidating outputs into a single workflow. Findings should be risk-scored and integrated with issue trackers so that developers see only actionable vulnerabilities relevant to their code. False positives must be minimized through calibration and validation. Security teams should also establish escalation paths so that only high-severity alerts interrupt developers in real-time, while lower-priority findings can be addressed during regular sprints.

7. Align AppSec with Business Outcomes

Security must be positioned as an enabler of business goals rather than a blocker. This requires mapping application security controls to tangible outcomes such as reduced downtime, faster compliance approval, and improved customer trust. For example, embedding automated compliance checks can shorten audit cycles, enabling faster entry into regulated markets. Similarly, reducing vulnerability remediation times lowers the risk of breaches that could impact brand reputation.

Risk prioritization should align with business impact. Not all vulnerabilities warrant equal attention—teams should focus first on flaws affecting critical systems, sensitive data, or customer-facing services. Security metrics should be expressed in terms that resonate with executives, such as reduced financial exposure or improved service reliability. By aligning AppSec initiatives with business outcomes, organizations ensure continued investment and collaboration across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

8. Strengthen DevSecOps with Runtime Security

Runtime security strengthens DevSecOps by giving teams real-time visibility into what’s actually happening in production. Traditional AppSec and cloud security tools often create noise by surfacing theoretical risks, leaving developers overwhelmed with alerts and slowing down delivery. By contrast, runtime insights focus only on actively exploitable vulnerabilities: what code is loaded, what functions are executed, and where malicious behavior is occurring. This precision eliminates guesswork, reduces vulnerability backlogs by up to 90%, and ensures security teams can direct developer effort toward fixes that truly matter. The result is a more efficient workflow that eliminates friction between security and engineering, aligning both teams around facts rather than assumptions.

More importantly, runtime security transforms DevSecOps into a proactive discipline. Instead of relying solely on point-in-time scans or post-incident investigations, teams can catch attacks at the earliest stage of the kill chain and block them before damage occurs. This real-time protection not only prevents breaches but also enables faster response cycles, clearer prioritization, and stronger collaboration across AppSec, cloud, and SOC functions. In practice, it means developers can keep shipping features at speed while security maintains confidence that the business is protected where it matters most—at runtime.

Runtime Security for DevSecOps with Oligo

Oligo observes applications in real time, showing exactly which libraries and functions are executed so teams know with certainty which vulnerabilities are truly exploitable. By detecting and blocking malicious behavior at the function level—without disrupting performance—Oligo enables DevSecOps teams to cut through noise, eliminate unnecessary backlog, and focus only on risks that matter.

Learn more about our approach.