DevSecOps is the practice of adding security checks to every aspect of the software development process, especially CI/CD pipelines. Instead of waiting until an application is live to check for security problems, DevSecOps tools focus on finding and fixing them as early as possible. The ultimate goal? Shift-left security, which saves money, strengthens code, and gives you iron-clad defenses.
Here’s how it works: DevSecOps fosters collaboration among development, security, and operations teams in one pipeline, increasing the pace of feedback and audits—and ultimately yielding faster fixes. By integrating security tools into the CI/CD pipeline, developers can catch issues automatically while they write and test code. For example, tools can scan the code for bugs or vulnerabilities in dependencies before release. With security locked down, developers can focus on what sets your company apart: innovation.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at why DevSecOps is a necessity. Then we’ll cover each step of implementation, giving you a comprehensive list of DevSecOps pipeline best practices in 2025. You’ll come away with a deep understanding of how to make the most of DevSecOps while facing its inherent challenges head-on. Let’s get started.
Why DevSecOps?
As more and more organizations move their systems and applications to the cloud, it's become mission-critical to keep a close eye on every part of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Security simply can’t be an afterthought anymore. That’s where DevSecOps comes in.
DevSecOps offers…
Early detection
As we’ve seen, DevSecOps helps you identify critical vulnerabilities and security issues during the initial stages of software development, including code writing and building. By addressing these problems proactively, teams can implement necessary fixes promptly, ensuring the delivery of more secure, reliable, and high-quality software with reduced risks and faster deployment.
Better compliance
Integrating security into your development pipelines prepares you to meet strict compliance requirements such as PCI DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO, and more. These regulatory standards mandate secure development practices, including vulnerability detection and remediation. By embedding security early, your organization not only achieves compliance but also builds safer, more trustworthy software systems.
Continuous monitoring
With well-established security checks in pipelines, continuous monitoring is established by default. Developers won't have to rely on post-deployment checks or scheduled checks to catch security issues.
Cost and time savings
Continuous monitoring and addressing issues during development in small, manageable iterations significantly improves cost-efficiency. DevSecOps eliminates the need for lengthy post-development security reviews and prevents delays that are caused by waiting on separate security teams and vulnerability assessment teams. The end result? Faster feedback, quicker fixes, and a more streamlined, secure development and deployment process overall.
Lower risk, higher scalability
Continuous checks and fixes slash the risk of exposing your application to security vulnerabilities. And by fixing issues in the initial phases of development, there’s no limit on scalability.
The DevSecOps pipeline and best practices
In this section, we’ll take an in-depth look at all the different stages of DevSecOps and how you can implement them.
1. Planning
In the planning phase, teams focus on identifying potential threats early through threat modeling and risk assessment. Threat modeling is the way of identifying, analyzing, and recording potential security threats and vulnerabilities in an application, system, or process. By analyzing the design from a security perspective, teams can build security strategies into the foundation of the project and prioritize secure architecture choices before any code is written. It's best practice to always scope out the attack surface before starting the scan.
One example? You can do an nmap scan on your domains to discover your attack surface:
nmap -sS -T4 yourdomain.com(Use nmap or similar tools to get a baseline understanding of your attack surface before development begins.)
2. Coding
Following coding best practices means taking proactive measures to prevent SQL injection, cross-site scripting, broken access controls, and common vulnerabilities. Another pitfall to avoid? Hard-coded secrets.
Always have a static application security testing (SAST) scanner integrated in your pipelines. SAST examines source code to identify security vulnerabilities early in the SDLC.
3. Building
In the build phase, automated builds help compile and package the software. It’s important to integrate security checks here to catch unsafe code or dependencies. Tools can scan for known vulnerabilities in third-party libraries, ensure code integrity, and enforce secure configurations. Scanning should be done in this step to verify the security of artifacts like Helm Charts, Kustomize templates, and Terraform files.
Run tools like Trivy and kube-score on Helm files and tfsec on Terraform files:
- name: Run tfsec on Terraform code
run: |
curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/aquasecurity/tfsec/master/scripts/install_linux.sh | bash
tfsec ./terraform
# Install and run kube-score (Helm Chart scanner)
- name: Run kube-score on Helm Charts
run: |
curl -L -o kube-score https://github.com/zegl/kube-score/releases/latest/download/kube-score-linux-amd64
chmod +x kube-score
sudo mv kube-score /usr/local/bin/
kube-score score ./helm-chart/
# (Optional) Trivy scan for Helm Charts
- name: Scan Helm Charts with Trivy
uses: aquasecurity/trivy-action@master
with:
scan-type: config
scan-ref: ./helm-chart/Note: While kube-score focuses on best practices and manifest health, it’s not a security scanner per se. Use tools like Trivy or kube-hunter for dedicated Kubernetes security checks.
4. Testing
Dynamic application security testing (DAST) and interactive application security testing (IAST) can simulate real-world attacks and analyze app behavior at runtime. These tools help discover issues that static analysis might miss, such as logic flaws or insecure runtime behavior, giving a more complete view of the app’s security posture.
DAST (Dynamic Application Security Testing): Simulates attacks on a running application (without access to code) to find runtime vulnerabilities.
IAST (Interactive Application Security Testing): Combines elements of both by monitoring application behavior in real time during testing to deliver more accurate, context-aware results.
Below is an example of a contrast security agent for IAST:
- name: Install and run Contrast Security Agent
run: |
curl -L https://downloads.contrastsecurity.com/latest/contrast-java-agent.jar -o contrast-agent.jar
# Run with agent attached (mocked here)
# export JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS="-javaagent:contrast-agent.jar"
# java $JAVA_TOOL_OPTIONS -jar build/libs/myapp.jar
echo "Pretend we attached IAST agent here during runtime"And here’s an example of a DAST scan using OWASP ZAP:
- name: DAST Scan with OWASP ZAP
uses: zaproxy/action-baseline@v0.11.0
with:
target: 'http://localhost:8080'
fail_action: true
rules_file_name: '.zap/rules.tsv'5. Releasing
In this phase, checks and gates must be present to make sure that if any vulnerabilities or security checks in earlier phases are missed, the deployment is blocked. This phase includes running final security scans, reviewing access controls, and checking audit logs.
6. Deploying
During deployment, it’s essential to ensure that your pipelines include scripts or automation to enforce strong network security, proper policy configurations, access control mechanisms, encryption standards, and secure key management.
Scan for network policies and IAM roles after each change.
7. Operating
Once the deployment is live and starts receiving traffic, remember to continuously check for issues. Follow these best practices:
Choose tools that keep an eye on logging, provide intrusion detection, and generate real-time alerts to identify suspicious activity early.
Teams should track system health, unusual user behavior, and any attempted breaches.
Regular patching, updates, and incident response processes should also be in place to keep systems secure during ongoing operation.
Remember: SIEM solutions help here by continuously monitoring your logs and changes and by providing real-time alerts.
Overcoming DevSecOps pipeline challenges
Challenge: Speed vs. security
Adding extra layers of security in different steps of your CI/CD process can delay deployments due to multiple checks and scans. It also takes time for developers to fix bugs that are found. The end result? A software development lifecycle that can feel sluggish.
Solution
In the long run, prioritizing security ensures better stability, customer trust, and compliance. Any slight impact on speed is a worthwhile tradeoff for safer, more reliable software that can scale confidently in today’s threat-heavy digital environment. Better yet? Finding bugs early often saves time and money.
Challenge: Noisy alerts
We all know that adding scans and checks can result in a lot of false positives. In turn, these false positives can generate a lot of alerts that aren’t actionable but do cause stress. It’s critical to mitigate noisy alerts so that important alerts aren’t missed due to alert fatigue.
Solution
Fine-tuning rules and regularly updating policies and thresholds are effective ways of tackling noisy alerts. Keeping track of alerts and classifying them according to priority will help you tune thresholds and save you from noise.
Challenge: Compliance
As your company grows, you have to contend with maintaining security at scale and adhering to frameworks and laws like PCI DSS, HIPAA, ISO, and SOC 2.
Solution
DevSecOps processes create logs and reports that are useful during audits. Instead of checking everything manually, a lot of report generation can be done automatically. In other words, compliance is an area where DevSecOps speeds up your timelines while helping you make your systems more secure.
How can Wiz help you at each step?
Even though DevSecOps pipelines can seem overwhelming, it all comes down to choosing the right partner. Enter Wiz Code.
Wiz Code can support you throughout every phase of the development lifecycle by helping design, implement, and manage your DevSecOps pipelines, ensuring security is integrated seamlessly from planning to deployment and beyond:
Planning: Wiz provides full visibility of your infrastructure across the entire code-to-cloud lifecycle, making it a snap to define your attack vectors and risks. Another benefit? Full visibility empowers teams to collaborate and plan features knowing that security is taken care of at every stage.
Coding: Count on Wiz to find vulnerable packages and security credentials in code. Wiz also integrates with Checkmarx for bi-directional support: Wiz includes Checkmarx SAST findings, and you can pull Wiz cloud inventory and assets with network exposure into Checkmarx for remediation.
Wiz also has in-code remediation. With one-click fixes directly within the development workflow, Wiz accelerates the remediation process, enabling developers to address issues swiftly and efficiently.
Wiz integrates natively with GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, CircleCI, and Jenkins—so developers don’t have to leave their workflow to fix high-priority issues.
Building: Wiz integrates seamlessly into your CI/CD pipeline and scans for vulnerabilities in container images and IaC templates. TL;DR?: Whiz doesn’t let any vulnerabilities slip by.
Testing: By continuously scanning your cloud environment, applications, and associated dependencies for known Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), Wiz helps identify and address security risks early.
Releases: Wiz enforces policies for compliance gating, meaning if any policies are breached, the release will be blocked. And the Wiz unified policy engine ensures consistent policy enforcement across code, CI/CD, and cloud environments, preventing vulnerabilities and misconfigurations from becoming toxic combinations.
Deploying: Here are just a few of Wiz’s game-changing deployment features:
Wiz scans IaC deployment scripts along with Kubernetes configurations to make sure every best practice is followed.
Wiz provides clear insights and suggestions, making it easier for developers and DevOps teams to fix problems quickly. This proactive approach helps maintain a secure and well-configured cloud setup right from the start.
Wiz Code detects and remediates exposed secrets in code, preventing unauthorized access and protecting sensitive data.
Monitoring: With real-time threat detection and risk correlation, you get peace of mind that Wiz is always keeping watch on your cloud environment. And the Wiz Security Graph gives you an at-a-glance view of exposed secrets, privilege escalations, and other risks.
DevSecOps success depends on integrating security early—without slowing your team down. Wiz Code secures every step of your pipeline, with full context, seamless integrations, and fast, in-line remediation.
👉 Schedule a demo today and start building securely, from code to cloud.
