DevSecOps Best Practices: How to Integrate Security into Your DevOps Pipeline

DevOps and security teams often operate with conflicting goals: one pushes for speed, the other for safety. This friction creates bottlenecks, slows innovation, and builds security debt. But what if you could align these functions with a clear, actionable framework? Instead of just talking about “shifting left,” you could implement a structured process that embeds security into every stage of development: DevSecOps best practices.

A mature DevSecOps operating model is not about adding more tools or meetings; it’s about transforming your Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) into a secure, efficient engine for innovation. This guide outlines six essential DevSecOps best practices, framed as a step-by-step process, to help you build security in from the start.

What is DevSecOps, Really?

DevSecOps is the practice of integrating security testing and protection into every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). It moves security from a final gate before deployment to a shared responsibility that is automated and continuous. The goal is simple: make security an intrinsic part of how you build software, not an afterthought.

Why DevSecOps Best Practices Matter

Implementing a secure SDLC isn’t just a compliance checkbox; it’s a strategic advantage. Modern development cycles are rapid, with CI/CD pipelines enabling multiple releases per day. Bolting security on at the end is no longer viable. This reactive approach creates significant security debt (a backlog of known vulnerabilities) that increases risk and slows down future innovation. The 2025 State of Software Security report revealed that nearly half of organizations have critical security debt.

By adopting DevSecOps best practices, you empower teams to find and fix flaws early, automate security guardrails, and gain unified visibility into your application risk. The result is faster, more secure delivery, less security debt, and a stronger security posture.

6 DevSecOps Best Practices to Implement Now

Ready to get practical? Here are six DevSecOps best practices to transform your pipeline.

1: Discover and Assess Risks

What it is: The foundational step is to create a comprehensive inventory of all your applications and their associated components. You can’t protect what you don’t know you have.

Why it matters: This discovery process establishes a baseline for your DevSecOps efforts. It helps you understand your attack surface, prioritize critical applications, and identify owners, which is crucial for effective risk management.

How to do it:

• Identify your entire application portfolio, including web apps, mobile apps, microservices, and legacy systems.
• Map out open-source dependencies, third-party libraries, and API usage.
• Determine which applications handle sensitive data or are critical to business operations.
• Use threat modeling to understand the risk levels associated with different assets.

Watch out for: Incomplete inventories. Forgetting about shadow IT, abandoned projects, or third-party applications can leave significant gaps in your security visibility.

2: Establish Prevention Methods

What it is: Proactively embedding security controls and tools early in the development workflow to prevent flaws from being introduced in the first place.

Why it matters: Prevention is far more efficient and cost-effective than remediation. Equipping developers with the right tools fosters a secure coding culture and stops security debt from accumulating. This is the core of a DevSecOps best practice or “shift left” strategy.

How to do it:

• Integrate Static Application Security Testing (SAST) and Software Composition Analysis (SCA) tools directly into developer IDEs.
• Provide developers with AI-assisted remediation tools to get instant feedback and code fix suggestions.
• Use a package firewall to block malicious or non-compliant open-source packages before they enter your software supply chain.

Watch out for: Tool fatigue. Overloading developers with noisy tools full of false positives will lead them to be ignored. Focus on tools that provide accurate, actionable feedback.

3: Onboard and Scale Applications

What it is: Systematically integrating your applications into your security testing program and automating scans within the CI/CD pipeline.

Why it matters: Automation makes security scalable and ensures consistent vigilance. Continuous scanning provides a constant feedback loop, giving you an up-to-date view of your security posture across the entire application portfolio.

How to do it:

• Automate initial SAST and SCA scans to establish a security baseline for each application.
• Configure security scans to run on every code commit or pull request, acting as an automated quality gate.
• Integrate container security and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) scanning to secure your cloud-native deployments.

Watch out for: Breaking the build without context. When a scan fails a build, provide developers with clear, actionable guidance on the vulnerability and how to fix it. Security should enable, not just block.

4: Set Policies

What it is: Defining and enforcing clear application security policies based on your organization’s risk tolerance, business criticality, and regulatory requirements.

Why it matters: Policies translate risk management objectives into technical controls. Using policy-as-code makes enforcement automated, consistent, and auditable, creating a shared language between security and development teams.

How to do it:

• Collaborate with security, development, and business leaders to define risk tolerance levels.
• Define policies based on factors like vulnerability severity (CVSS), weakness type (CWE), or compliance mandates (PCI DSS, HIPAA).
• Store policy files in a version control system and enforce them automatically in the CI/CD pipeline.

Watch out for: One-size-fits-all policies. A critical, internet-facing application should have a much stricter policy than a low-risk internal tool. Tailor policies to the risk profile of each application.

5: Prioritize and Address Findings

What it is: Categorizing, prioritizing, and resolving security findings that violate your established policies. This involves a clear process for remediation or mitigation.

Why it matters: Not all vulnerabilities are created equal. With thousands of potential findings, effective prioritization is key to focusing remediation efforts where they matter most. This helps you systematically pay down critical security debt.

How to do it:

• Use a unified risk management platform to consolidate findings from all security tools (SAST, DAST, SCA).
• Prioritize flaws based on severity, exploitability, and the business impact of the affected application.
• Establish clear timelines for the remediation of different types of vulnerabilities.

Watch out for: Focusing only on “critical” flaws. A chain of medium-severity vulnerabilities on a critical application can sometimes create a more dangerous attack path. Context is essential for smart prioritization.

6: Leverage Reporting and Analytics

What it is: Using a unified reporting system to track security metrics, measure program effectiveness, and demonstrate progress to stakeholders.

Why it matters: You can’t improve what you don’t measure. Reporting and analytics provide the visibility needed to identify trends, pinpoint areas for improvement, and demonstrate compliance. It transforms security from a cost center into a measurable business enabler.

How to do it:

• Track key performance indicators (KPIs) like Mean Time to Remediate (MTTR), flaw density, policy compliance rates, and scan coverage.
• Create dashboards to give leadership a real-time view of the organization’s security posture.
• Use data to celebrate wins and justify future security investments.

Watch out for: Vanity metrics. Focus on metrics that reflect genuine risk reduction, not just activity. A high number of scans is meaningless if critical flaws are not being fixed.

Your 30/60/90-Day DevSecOps Best Practices Rollout Plan

Ready to start? Here’s a plan to build momentum.

• First 30 Days: Establish Visibility (Steps 1 & 3)
  • Select a pilot team and application.
  • Perform a discovery audit to inventory the application’s components and generate a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM).
  • Onboard the app and establish a baseline with initial SAST and SCA scans in the CI/CD pipeline.
• First 60 Days: Automate Prevention (Steps 2 & 4)
  • Roll out IDE-based scanning tools to the pilot team to establish prevention methods.
  • Define an initial security policy-as-code and begin enforcing it for the pilot application.
• First 90 Days: Prioritize and Measure (Steps 5 & 6)
  • Establish a process to prioritize and triage findings from the pilot application.
  • Create an initial dashboard to report on key metrics like open critical flaws and remediation progress. Present these findings to leadership.

Take the Next Step

Following these DevSecOps best practices provides a clear roadmap for building a mature, effective application security program. You can move beyond theoretical concepts and implement a practical framework that reduces risk while accelerating innovation.

This guide gives you the blueprint. For the full playbook with deeper insights and technical guidance, download our comprehensive DevSecOps Best Practices eBook today.