What is the Difference Between DevOps and DevSecOps?

For engineering managers, the pressure to deliver software faster has never been higher. You are constantly balancing the need for velocity with the imperative of stability and quality. While DevOps revolutionized the software development life cycle (SDLC) by breaking down silos between development and operations, it left a critical gap: security.

In a landscape where cyberattacks are growing in sophistication and frequency, treating security as an afterthought is no longer a viable strategy. This realization has driven the industry toward a new paradigm. But exactly what is the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps?

It isn’t just a buzzword change; it is a fundamental shift in how your teams approach code quality, technical debt, and risk.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and cultural philosophies that automate and integrate the processes between software development and IT teams. Its primary goal is to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality.

By fostering collaboration between developers and operations professionals, DevOps removed the traditional bottlenecks of manual deployments and siloed infrastructure management.

The Core Focus of DevOps

• Speed and Efficiency: accelerating time-to-market.
• Collaboration: Aligning development and operations goals.
• Automation: Using CI/CD pipelines to build, test, and deploy code rapidly.

However, in a traditional DevOps model, security often remains a separate, downstream activity. Security checks typically occur at the end of the development process—just before deployment. This “gatekeeper” approach can create friction, causing last-minute delays or forcing teams to release software with known vulnerabilities to meet deadlines.

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps (Development, Security, and Operations) is the integration of security practices and tools directly into the DevOps pipeline. It transforms security from a separate, reactive phase into a continuous, automated, and collaborative effort across development, security, and operations teams.

In a DevSecOps model, security is “shifted left.” This means security testing and vulnerability scanning happen early in the SDLC, often as soon as code is written.

The Core Focus of DevSecOps

• Proactive Security: Identifying and fixing flaws in real-time.
• Shared Responsibility: Making security everyone’s job, not just the security team’s.
• Continuous Risk Mitigation: Embedding security controls from code to cloud.

DevSecOps ensures that security is an inherent part of the CI/CD process. By implementing DevSecOps in your organization, you empower your developers to write secure code from the start, reducing the accumulation of security debt and ensuring business resilience.

Key Differences Between DevOps and DevSecOps

To understand what is the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps, you must look at how each methodology handles risk and workflow integration. While DevOps focuses on speed of delivery, DevSecOps focuses on the speed of secure delivery.

1. Security Integration: Reactive vs. Proactive

In DevOps, security is often a final hurdle. If a critical vulnerability is found days before launch, you face a difficult choice: delay the release or accept the risk.

In DevSecOps, security is proactive. Automated tools scan code as it is committed. This allows your team to fix flaws while the code is still fresh in their minds, drastically reducing rework time.

2. Team Collaboration

• DevOps: Focuses on the handshake between Development and Operations to ensure code runs smoothly in production.
• DevSecOps: Expands this collaboration to include Security. It bridges the communication gap, ensuring security teams are not blockers but enablers who provide developers with the tools they need to succeed.

3. Automation and Tools

Both methodologies rely heavily on automation, but the scope differs. DevOps automation centers on build and deployment. DevSecOps embeds security gates within that automation. For example, a build might fail automatically if a high-severity vulnerability is detected, preventing insecure code from ever moving to the next stage.

4. Risk Mitigation

DevOps prioritizes deployment frequency. Without integrated security, this speed can inadvertently increase the attack surface. DevSecOps prioritizes continuous risk mitigation. It ensures that as you scale and accelerate, your security posture scales with you.

Why Transition from DevOps to DevSecOps?

The cost of ignoring security integration is rising. The average cost of a data breach is $4.4 million, according to IBM. Transitioning to DevSecOps is essential for reducing “security debt” – the backlog of unresolved vulnerabilities that accumulates over time.

The High Cost of Security Debt

Recent data from the 2025 State of Software Security report shows that 74% of organizations carry security debt, with half showing critical debt (high severity, long-unresolved flaws). Crucially, roughly 70% of applications contain flaws in third-party code. If your team relies heavily on open-source libraries, a DevOps-only approach leaves you exposed to supply chain risks.

AI and the Changing Landscape

With a majority of developers now using AI tools to write code, the volume of code being produced is exploding. While AI increases velocity, it does not guarantee security. A DevSecOps approach is the only way to govern this increased output effectively, scanning AI-generated code with the same rigor as human-written code.

For a deeper dive into common misconceptions about this transition, read our article on DevSecOps myths debunked.

How to Get Started with DevSecOps: Six Essential Steps

Successfully adopting DevSecOps requires a structured, practical approach that integrates security throughout the entire software development lifecycle. Based on Veracode’s Secure SDLC framework, here are six essential steps to guide your transition:

1. Discover and Assess Risks

Begin by identifying all applications in your environment, their owners, dependencies—including open-source components and AI-generated code, and associated risk levels. A comprehensive inventory lays the groundwork for accurate risk assessment and helps set your security priorities.

2. Establish Prevention Methods

Implement prevention controls early in the SDLC. Deploy security testing tools—such as Static Application Security Testing (SAST), Dynamic Analysis (DAST), and Software Composition Analysis (SCA)—within development pipelines. Continuously monitor for vulnerabilities in open-source libraries and container images. Leverage AI-assisted remediation to accelerate fixes. Unify, prioritize, and centralize findings to provide clear direction for remediation.

3. Onboard and Scale Applications

Integrate automated security scanning into your developers’ workflow from the start. Scale these practices across all applications to establish a consistent security posture baseline, ensuring new and existing apps are protected without slowing delivery.

4. Set Policies

Define policies that align with your organization’s risk tolerance, compliance requirements, and application criticality. Embed enforcement into CI/CD pipelines to ensure policies are consistently applied and that vulnerabilities are addressed before they reach production.

5. Prioritize and Address Findings

Not all flaws carry equal risk. Categorize, triage, and address policy-violating findings efficiently, remediating or mitigating those that pose the greatest threat to your business. Focus effort on resolving high-severity issues and reducing security debt.

6. Leverage Reporting and Analytics

Utilize unified reporting platforms to aggregate security insights across your portfolio. Track remediation progress, identify bottlenecks, demonstrate compliance, and refine your AppSec program over time. Actionable analytics empower you to make data-driven decisions that continuously improve your security posture.

For a detailed guide to integrating these steps into your pipeline, explore our DevSecOps best practices for the SDLC.

Understanding what is the difference between DevOps and DevSecOps is the first step toward building a more resilient engineering organization. DevOps gave us speed; DevSecOps gives us sustainable speed.

By embedding security into every phase of development, you reduce technical debt, protect your organization from rising threats, and empower your team to innovate with confidence. You don’t have to choose between speed and security. With the right strategy, you achieve both.

Ready to build secure software without slowing down?

Download our comprehensive DevSecOps Best Practices eBook today.