Key Concept

What Are DevSecOps Pipelines?

Understanding DevSecOps Pipelines: Complete Guide for 2025

DevSecOps pipelines integrate security into every phase of the software development lifecycle, from planning and building to testing, deploying, and monitoring, enabling early vulnerability detection, automated testing, and enhanced collaboration between teams for consistent, secure, and compliant application delivery.

Article Contents

Defining DevSecOps Pipelines

What are DevSecOps Pipelines?

DevSecOps pipelines are automated workflows that integrate with security practices throughout the software development lifecycle. These CI/CD pipelines integrate security controls, testing, and monitoring at every stage, ensuring that security is entrenched as part of the software development process.

Security tools that integrate with CI/CD provide real-time vulnerability checks and continuous post-deployment management across all components, hardening your software factory floor.

DevSecOps Pipeline Phases

CI/CD pipelines focus on the integration of development tools and practices into the process of planning, building, testing, deploying, and monitoring software. Adding new security measures across the pipeline can improve your overall application security. Each phase of the pipeline will require updates to achieve the goal. If we look across the pipeline, four phases need to be updated:

Code and Pre-build – Critical security steps include code signing, scanning an entire codebase for vulnerabilities, and scanning individual files for code weaknesses.
Build – These actions include generating an image SBOM, image signing, and pre-package verification.
Post-Build – If the build step above does not include creating an SBOM image, a post-build effort is needed to add security actions for generating a complete SBOM of the entire build image.
Publish – Store and share containers, generate container CVEs, and collect security evidence to show an organization’s security profile.
Beyond adding security to the phases of the pipeline, auditing the pipeline itself further hardens the application life cycle process.

For more information and a complete guide to security tooling for CI/CD Cybersecurity, visit the Continuous Delivery Foundation’s CI/CD Cybersecurity Guide for a listing of open-source tools that will help you meet the Secure Software Development Framework guidelines.

Why are DevSecOps Pipelines so Important?

DevSecOps pipelines are critical in enhancing security during the software development process. By integrating security early on during the process and automating security practices, organizations can achieve the following benefits:

Organization alignment

DevSecOps pipelines help align security and software development teams, which can be a bottleneck for older security models.

Integrated security

DevSecOps pipelines incorporate security considerations into every phase of the software development process, including deployment automation, security checks, and continuous monitoring.

Automated testing

DevSecOps pipelines can automate security testing into the software development lifecycle. Compared to manual methods, automated tools can more quickly, accurately, and efficiently identify vulnerabilities and enforce security policies standards.

Encourages collaboration

DevSecOps pipelines can help foster collaboration and communication between development, release management, and security teams. Improved collaboration ensures that security requirements are thoroughly understood by every team member. It can help identify and fix security issues early, before potentially causing damage to an organization.

Benefits of DevSecOps Pipelines

Early Detection: Identify and address security vulnerabilities at an early stage, which allows for quicker remediation. Early detection of vulnerabilities reduces the chances of deploying insecure code to production.
Consistent Security Policies: Enforce consistent security policies across the development lifecycle, ensuring that security is not compromised during different phases of deployment.
Compliance and Governance: DevSecOps helps organizations align development practices with compliance requirements, better enabling them to adhere to regulatory standards and security governance.
Improved Incident Response: when a major security issue arises, DevSecOps pipelines enhance incident response with automated mechanisms, enabling quick identification, isolation and resolution.
Continuous security validation: DevSecOps pipelines automate security testing and validation at every stage of the development process. Automated security tools can scan code, configurations, and dependencies, ensuring that security controls are in place and vulnerabilities are identified promptly.
Consistent security controls: DevSecOps pipelines enforce consistent security controls across the development pipeline. With predefined security checks and practices incorporated into the pipeline, organizations can ensure that security standards and best practices are consistently applied throughout the development process, reducing the risk of insecure code or configurations.
Improved collaboration: DevSecOps pipelines promote collaboration between development, security, and operations teams. By integrating security directly into the development process, these pipelines break down silos and foster communication and cooperation between teams. This collaboration results in a better understanding of security requirements, efficient issue resolution, and improved overall security posture.
Faster and more secure deployments: DevSecOps pipelines enable the continuous delivery and deployment of secure applications. By automating security testing and validation, organizations can speed up the release process while ensuring the security of the deployed applications. This fosters agility and reduces the time between development and deployment, ultimately benefiting the end-user.

What is DevSecOps Pipeline Integration?

DevSecOps pipeline integration combines traditional DevOps tooling with integrated security tasks. New security requirements are forcing updates to DevOps pipelines that have been running without issue for years. With new security needs, such as Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) reporting, DevOps teams are being asked to evolve these pipelines to include critical security tooling.

DevSecOps Pipeline Integration and SBOM Generation

DevSecOps Pipeline Integration is where SBOM automation is done. SBOMs are created at build time and must be included as part of your CI/CD workflow to gather the forensics of your software supply chain. The information derived from an SBOM is a critical first step in understanding your application security posture including the open-source software consumed.

The SBOM exposes the open-source packages with attributes that are consumable and delivered to end users. But generating an SBOM as part of your DevSecOps pipeline is not all that is needed. The SBOM results must be consumed to continuously scan for vulnerabilities after the software has been deployed.

How DeployHub Helps with DevSecOps Pipeline Integration

DeployHub’s vulnerability detection platform integrates seamlessly with CI/CD pipelines, from Jenkins to GitHub, to ensure the implementation of security tooling from build thru deployment. Automated security checks at each stage help identify vulnerabilities at the point they are introduced, enabling timely and low-cost remediation.

To support the consumption of SBOMs, DeployHub collects SBOM results with historical tracking to continuously audit every component version for non-stop vulnerability detection in the DevSecOps platform.

The steps for adding SBOM generation to your workflow are fairly straightforward. With DeployHub, minimal updates to your pipeline workflow files are required. DeployHub uses the Ortelius Open-source CLI interface to support your DevSecOps Pipeline Integration.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does DevSecOps differ from traditional DevOps?

DevSecOps extends DevOps by embedding security throughout the software development lifecycle. While DevOps focuses on speed and continuous delivery, DevSecOps ensures security, compliance, and vulnerability management are automated at every stage.

Can DevSecOps pipelines help with regulatory compliance?

Yes. By automating security checks, enforcing consistent policies, and tracking SBOMs and vulnerabilities, DevSecOps pipelines help organizations comply with standards like ISO 27001, SOC 2, NIST, and government cybersecurity mandates.

What types of security tools are commonly integrated into DevSecOps pipelines?

Tools often include static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), container and image scanning, dependency vulnerability scanners, SBOM generators, and compliance automation platforms.

How do DevSecOps pipelines handle post-deployment vulnerabilities?

Advanced pipelines integrate continuous monitoring and digital twin technology to detect vulnerabilities in live environments. This allows teams to track which deployed components are affected and remediate in real time.

What is the role of automated testing in DevSecOps pipelines?

Automated testing ensures that security vulnerabilities, configuration issues, and compliance violations are identified early and continuously, reducing manual effort and accelerating secure software delivery.

How do DevSecOps pipelines improve collaboration between teams?

By embedding security checks and reporting directly into the CI/CD workflow, DevSecOps pipelines align development, security, and operations teams around shared visibility, metrics, and responsibilities.

Can DevSecOps pipelines prevent supply chain attacks?

Yes. By integrating SBOM generation, dependency scanning, and vulnerability tracking, pipelines help detect risky open-source packages, transitive dependencies, and malicious code before it reaches production.

How are SBOMs consumed within DevSecOps pipelines?

SBOMs are generated at build time and then continuously consumed to monitor deployed components for new vulnerabilities, track license compliance, and maintain a historical record of all software artifacts.

What challenges might organizations face when implementing DevSecOps pipelines?

Challenges include toolchain integration, team cultural shifts, scaling security automation across multiple environments, ensuring coverage for all microservices and dependencies, and maintaining continuous visibility in cloud-native architectures.

How do DevSecOps pipelines support faster and safer deployments?

By automating security validation, integrating vulnerability checks, and enabling continuous feedback loops, pipelines reduce delays caused by manual remediation, prevent insecure code from reaching production, and accelerate release cycles without compromising security.

Add DeployHub to Your DevOps Pipeline

DeployHub integrates seamlessly with CI/CD tools like Jenkins and Helm, collecting essential security forensics from build to deployment. This data enables DeployHub to identify vulnerabilities the moment they appear, allowing teams to remediate issues quickly and cost-effectively. It’s easy-to-install CLI continuously tracks vulnerabilities across all component versions, delivering automated vulnerability detection that protects live systems and strengthens cybersecurity across your entire software portfolio.

The DeployHub Platform

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See Open Source Software Security In Action.

Explore Ortelius and experience an open-source platform for post-deployment vulnerability management in action with a quick, hands-on overview. DeployHub, based on Ortelius OS, integrates with CI/CD tools like Jenkins and Helm, providing real-time security checks, tracking vulnerabilities, and supporting DevSecOps integration with the Ortelius Open-source CLI interface.