DevSecOps: What It Is and Why Pentesters Need It

What’s DevSecOps?

DevSecOps stands for Development, Security, and Operations. It's an approach to culture, automation, and platform design that integrates security as a shared responsibility throughout the entire IT lifecycle.

DevSecOps represents a natural and necessary evolution in the way development organizations approach security. In the past, security was 'tacked on' to software at the end of the development cycle, almost as an afterthought. A separate security team applied these security measures and then a separate quality assurance (QA) team tested these measures.

This ability to handle security issues was manageable when software updates were released just once or twice a year. But as software developers adopted Agile and DevOps practices, aiming to reduce software development cycles to weeks or even days, the traditional 'tacked-on' approach to security created an unacceptable bottleneck.

DevSecOps integrates application and infrastructure security seamlessly into Agile and DevOps processes and tools. It addresses security issues as they emerge, when they're easier, faster, and less expensive to fix, and before deployment into production.

What’s DevOps?

DevOps is an approach that increases efficiency in the software development lifecycle by combining development and operations largely achieved through automation via CI/CD pipelines. CI/CD stands for Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery. This paradigm automates tasks like testing, building, and deploying code, which were traditionally manual.

Continuous Integration is the development practice of committing small, frequent changes instead of merging multiple changes all at once. Each commit can trigger automated testing, allowing issues like build failures, code conflicts, and dependency errors to be detected and fixed early in the development process.

Continuous Deployment is the automated process of delivering the final (release) build of a project to production. Since the code has already passed through CI testing and validation, the CD process simply ships it to production.

A CI/CD pipeline is a series of predefined steps (e.g., build, test, deploy). If any step fails, the pipeline will abort to prevent faulty changes from being deployed to production.

Why Do Pentesters Need DevOps?

It's common for penetration testers and red teamers to write their own tooling to support their operations.  Like any other piece of software, automatically testing changes and building those tools saves time in the long run.  If you maintain code in a public repository and accept changes from the community, the appropriate CI/CD pipeline will help validate them before they're merged (so as to not introduce breaking changes).

You may also use well-known public tools written by other people.  These are often already well signatured by AV engines and a lot of manual effort may be needed to remove those from the code base.  CI/CD pipelines can automate this process and provide "clean" builds of all your tools at the press of a button.

DevSecOps vs. DevOps

DevOps isn't just about development and operations, it must include IT security throughout the application lifecycle. Traditionally, security was addressed at the end of development, but that model is ineffective with today’s rapid release cycles.

DevSecOps integrates security as a shared responsibility from the start, embedding it directly into both development and operations. This includes:

• Automating security checks.

• Selecting tools that support secure development without slowing workflows.

The “shift left” approach refers to integrating security early in the development process, while “shift right” emphasizes continued testing, monitoring, and performance evaluation after deployment.

Together, they ensure continuous and proactive security throughout the entire DevOps pipeline.

In Summary

DevSecOps is the natural evolution of DevOps, ensuring that security is a shared, continuous responsibility across development and operations. As development cycles accelerate, embedding security early and automating it through CI/CD pipelines becomes essential. For pentesters, adopting DevOps practices means more efficient tooling, cleaner builds, and faster validation. Ultimately, DevSecOps helps deliver secure, reliable software, faster.