DevSecOps.

DevSecOps extends DevOps by treating security as a shared responsibility across development, security and operations rather than a downstream gate. It automates security controls inside CI/CD pipelines — SAST, SCA, secret scanning, container scanning, IaC analysis, DAST and policy-as-code — so issues are surfaced where developers already work. It pairs automation with cultural change: security champions, blameless retrospectives, security KPIs in dashboards and self-service tooling.

The discipline gained urgency after software-supply-chain attacks. The 2020 SolarWinds SUNBURST compromise inserted a backdoor into the build process itself, and the 2021 Codecov Bash Uploader breach leaked secrets from thousands of pipelines — showing that the pipeline is now part of the attack surface. In response, U.S. Executive Order 14028 (May 2021) mandated SBOMs and secure development attestations for federal software, and frameworks such as SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts) and NIST SSDF (SP 800-218) codified provenance, signed artifacts, and hardened build environments.

Done well, DevSecOps shortens mean-time-to-remediate, reduces the escape rate of vulnerabilities to production, and lowers compliance friction — all while keeping deployment frequency high. The key discipline is failing builds on high-severity findings without drowning developers in false positives.

flowchart LR
  A[Code / commit] --> B[Pre-commit<br/>secret scan · lint]
  B --> C[Build & test<br/>SAST · SCA · IaC scan]
  C --> D[Package<br/>container scan · sign artifact · SBOM]
  D --> E{Policy gate<br/>OPA · SLSA}
  E -->|Fail high severity| A
  E -->|Pass| F[Deploy]
  F --> G[Runtime<br/>DAST · monitoring · feedback]
  G --> A