Shift left with these 11 DevSecOps best practices

1. Inventory assets

You cannot secure what you cannot see. Maintain a comprehensive, real-time inventory of all applications, services, dependencies and infrastructure components across the organization, including the following:

• Internal applications.
• Third-party software.
• APIs.
• Databases.
• Cloud resources.
• Shadow IT.

Catalog critical information, including data sensitivity levels, business criticality, ownership and interconnections between systems.

Use automated discovery tools to continuously map the attack surface and identify new assets as they're deployed. Use software composition analysis tools to find licensing issues in application components, and implement container scanning to identify vulnerabilities within images and code.

Understanding the organization's complete digital estate enables risk-based prioritization, ensures nothing falls through security cracks and provides essential context for incident response. Without an accurate asset inventory, security efforts become scattered and ineffective, leaving exploitable blind spots and making it more difficult to maintain compliance.

2. Know objectives

Define specific, measurable security goals before implementing any program -- whether the company is deep and narrowly focused on critical vulnerabilities or broad and shallow across the entire application portfolio. Establish clear timescales, key performance indicators and success criteria that align with business objectives and risk tolerance. Decide upfront to prioritize rapid coverage across many applications or comprehensive security for mission-critical systems.

Set realistic targets, such as "reduce critical vulnerabilities by 80% in six months" or "achieve security testing coverage for 100% of customer-facing applications."

Clear objectives prevent scope creep, enable proper resource allocation and provide measurable outcomes that demonstrate security program value. Without well-defined goals, security initiatives become unfocused efforts that struggle to show concrete business impact or justify continued investment.

3. Conduct threat monitoring

Conduct threat monitoring early in and throughout the development process to help clarify and prioritize objectives.

Threat modeling involves using real-time security monitoring and logging tools and services to continuously look for threats, such as zero-days, secret exposure and dependency vulnerabilities. The process is key to proactively identifying weaknesses within development and applications.

Threat modeling paired with risk assessments helps identify and prioritize vulnerabilities and implement fixes before they affect the live product.

4. Study the team's delivery pipeline and iterate carefully

Before implementing any security practices, thoroughly understand how the development team currently works -- its tools, processes and pain points. Map security controls to existing workflows rather than forcing teams to adopt entirely new processes.

Start with small, incremental changes that provide immediate value without disrupting productivity. Wide-ranging security rollouts that attempt to transform everything at once almost always fail due to resistance and complexity. Instead, integrate security gradually into the pipeline, enabling teams to adapt and see benefits before introducing additional measures. This approach builds trust and facilitates sustainable adoption.

5. Automate with caution

While automation is crucial for scalable security, not every security tool belongs in the main build pipeline. Heavy dynamic application security testing and comprehensive cloud configuration scans can significantly slow down development cycles if placed directly in the critical path.

Instead, run these resource-intensive scans in parallel pipelines or dedicated security-only workflows. Focus on integrating lightweight, fast-feedback tools, such as static analysis and dependency checks, into the main build, while scheduling deeper security assessments during off-hours or as part of release processes. Automating with caution maintains development velocity while ensuring thorough security coverage.

6. Make doing the right thing the easiest way

Security should be the path of least resistance for developers, not an obstacle to overcome. Implement concepts such as landing zones or common platforms that provide preconfigured, hardened environments with standard security tools already integrated.

When secure patterns are built into default infrastructure and workflows, developers naturally follow best practices without additional effort. Provide secure-by-default templates, automated provisioning of compliant resources and self-service capabilities that guide teams toward secure configurations.

This approach eliminates the friction between security requirements and developer productivity to ensure the secure option is also the most convenient option.

7. 'Break the build' as a last resort

Implementing security gates that halt the build process should only happen after thoroughly tuning security tools to minimize false positives. Start by running tools in observation mode to triage alerts and understand noise patterns, then adjust thresholds accordingly.

High false-positive rates erode developer trust and lead to security bypasses or ignored alerts. Before enforcing blocking gates, focus on achieving low noise levels through proper tool configuration, custom rules and baseline establishment.

Once tools consistently identify genuine security issues without overwhelming teams with irrelevant alerts, then implement enforcement mechanisms. This measured approach ensures security gates add value rather than becoming productivity bottlenecks that teams work around.

8. Keep secrets secret

Secrets management requires the same rigor as any critical infrastructure component. Scan git repositories to discover accidental credential exposure. Centralize all secrets in dedicated services, such as HashiCorp Vaults or cloud-native secrets managers, and implement automatic rotation to minimize exposure windows. Enforce strict role-based access control with least-privilege principles to ensure users and services access only the secrets they need.

Comprehensive coverage is essential:

• Secure secrets across continuous integration/continuous delivery pipelines, Kubernetes clusters, code repositories and developer laptops.
• Never hardcode credentials in source code or configuration files.
• Use short-lived tokens where possible and implement proper audit logging for all secret access.

Strong secrets management eliminates one of the most common attack vectors while maintaining operational efficiency.

9. Use cloud-native and reproducible infrastructure

To help reduce the attack surface, eliminate persistent infrastructure that can accumulate vulnerabilities over time. Provide elastic scaling for security workloads and simplified incident response through rapid infrastructure replacement.

Embrace cloud-native patterns that enhance security through immutability and scalability. Run security scanners as ephemeral workloads in AWS Fargate, Lambda functions or Kubernetes jobs rather than maintaining persistent scanning infrastructure.

Use state machines, such as AWS Step Functions or Azure Logic Apps, to orchestrate complex security workflows that span multiple tools and environments. Treat infrastructure as "cattle, not pets" -- design systems to be disposable and replaceable rather than long-lived and manually maintained.

10. Provide standard reference architectures and patterns

Creating a curated collection of proven patterns reduces security risks by giving developers secure-by-default starting points, eliminates the need to reinvent security controls and safeguards consistency across projects. Well-documented reference architectures accelerate development while embedding security best practices into the foundation of every application.

Establish centralized repositories of approved architectural blueprints, secure coding patterns and vetted libraries that development teams can readily adopt. Create wikis, template repositories and pattern libraries that showcase positive security implementations -- from secure authentication flows to proper data handling practices. Use the OWASP Top 10 to create a security baseline everyone should follow.

Provide standard methods for common security functions, such as input validation, encryption and API security, that teams can copy and customize. Include infrastructure-as-code templates for secure cloud deployments and containerized applications. Conduct compliance checks to determine whether code and applications collect data and personally identifiable information securely and within industry regulations.

11. Track progress, celebrate wins

Security improvements become sustainable when teams can see measurable progress and feel recognized for their efforts. Remember to track progress and celebrate wins along the way.

Implement metrics that matter, such as vulnerability remediation times, security test coverage, incident reduction and developer adoption of security tools. Create dashboards that visualize security posture improvements over time to make progress visible to both technical teams and leadership.

Celebrate milestones such as achieving zero critical vulnerabilities, successful security assessments or high adoption rates of secure coding practices. Recognition doesn't always need to be formal -- acknowledge teams that embrace security initiatives, share success stories across the organization and highlight security champions.

Positive reinforcement builds momentum, encourages continued engagement with security practices and transforms security from a compliance burden into a source of team pride and organizational resilience.

Colin Domoney is a software security consultant who evangelizes DevSecOps and helps developers secure their software. He previously worked for Veracode and 42Crunch and authored a book on API security. He is currently a CTO and co-founder, and an independent security consultant.