Integrating AppSec for efficient DevSecOps

"Security" is the result of combining the right tools, skilled personnel, and actionable insight to make informed decisions that mitigate risks within both the software that an organisation creates and the third-party components it consumes through the software supply chain. While this process can be complex, the accelerated, AI-enabled development methodologies and CI/CD pipelines demand that application security (AppSec) keeps pace with the speed of DevOps. Achieving this balance is only possible with integrated controls and mechanisms to detect, prioritise, and remediate security issues at every stage of the SDLC and CI/CD pipelines. The question, then, is how organisations can build a DevSecOps model that scales effectively to handle the drastic influx of AI-generated code, without overwhelming developers or slowing down delivery.

Black Duck research underlines the challenge: nearly 45% of organisations use between 11 and 20 security testing tools, while almost a quarter rely on between 21 and 50. This fragmented approach often creates more noise than value. The solution lies in unifying testing efforts and integrating the mechanisms that derive risk insight and provide clear guidance to the dev teams tasked with fixing issues. Once accomplished, you may more-effectively align security initiatives with business goals and help developers have "security" be the natural result of their everyday work.

Pitfalls That Can Derail an Organisation's AppSec Initiative

In the most fundamental terms, AppSec initiatives are at greatest risk of failing to uphold the needs and goals of stakeholders across Security, Development, DevOps, Legal, and business leadership. This is an all-too-common outcome when organisations:

• Use too many disparate AppSec tools
• Do not optimize those tools to balance coverage and speed
• Isolate AppSec testing from the pipeline or introduce potential points of failure into it
• Provide late-stage fix requirements that threaten code shipping deadlines

Organisations often purchase a wide range of application security testing tools, each designed to scan for specific issues such as static code flaws, open-source vulnerabilities, or runtime weaknesses. While each tool may be valuable in isolation, collectively they create a storm of alerts - many redundant, contradictory, or irrelevant - that are difficult to manage. Security teams quickly become overwhelmed with lengthy issue backlogs; developers succumb to alert fatigue and a resentment of the process. Over time, this undermines adoption and weakens security outcomes.

While security teams, understandably, want comprehensive checks, these can be perceived as slowing down delivery. Importantly, it's not always slow scan speeds that are the greatest impediment; it's inconvenient timing or inefficient configuration of the risk analysis. When deadlines loom, developers may be tempted to sidestep security gates or abbreviate security scans to ship features on time. This tension between speed and quality creates a dangerous dynamic where security teams or developers are forced to make compromising trade-offs or risk priority project and business outcomes.

The complexity of modern build and release pipelines, however, can be a daunting hurdle for AppSec teams to overcome when baking security testing into existing DevOps workflows. With multiple coding languages, frameworks, developer tools, and deployment environments in play, implementing standardised or integrated testing processes is far from straightforward. Without careful orchestration, security can become inconsistent, leaving gaps in coverage that attackers may exploit.

The absence of real-time feedback loops between security teams and developers means those tasked with fixing priority issues only learn about them late in the release cycle. By this point, development teams are moving on to other feature branches, DevOps and Cloud Ops teams are receiving the release for deployment, and organisations are more likely either to push insecure code or to cultivate frustration due to late-stage rework. This disconnect between detection and remediation diminishes both efficiency and trust and inflates costs associated with both development and security.

Lastly, it is too costly and time-consuming to reconfigure AppSec mechanisms each time the development pipeline changes. This becomes particularly important to consider as AI-enabled pipelines elevate scalability as an ongoing concern. Organisations cannot continue to bear the burden of managing multiple tools, enforcing distinct policies, and maintaining performance. Without a strategy for scaling securely, initiatives risk collapsing under their own weight.

Strategies for Overcoming Obstacles to Efficient, Effective DevSecOps

The first step in overcoming these challenges is a change of mindset. DevSecOps is a concerted effort across teams and contributors, and "security" must be facilitated by the intelligent use of the right test at the right time, governed by the policies and controls set in place by AppSec teams, and reflecting the broader needs of the business. Security that feels disconnected from - even contradictory to - business objectives is more likely to be subverted.

From this foundation, four pillars should guide the implementation of DevSecOps.

• Meet Developers Where They Are: Understanding how development and engineering teams define success, the tools, and processes they use, and helping inject security risk awareness and security capabilities into what they're already doing. This helps them support security without deviating from their established workflows.
• Integrate and Automate: Integrating critical tests for security, quality, and compliance so you can establish automated security gates that manage risk without adding manual effort. This closes the loop with development teams much more quickly, as close as possible to when that risk is introduced so they can fix faster or avoid issues altogether. This is critical to keeping pace with the deluge of code flooding pipelines from AI coding assistants.
• Cultivate Developer Security Capabilities: Standardizing expectations of security and empowering developers to support that while coding, fostering a technical workforce that helps make more-secure software over time, and reducing issue backlogs through regular activities. This enables developers to be essential cross-checks who can quickly monitor the output of semi-autonomous AI coding assistants and eliminate implicit trust in AI.
• Architect a DevSecOps Strategy That Can Evolve and Scale: There are many inherent truths to DevSecOps. Pipelines change, goals change, requirements, standards, and expectations all change over time. Organisations should avoid spending valuable time and resources redesigning an AppSec program repeatedly. Centralize and prioritize risk intelligence derived from various security tests, triaged against risk tolerance policies, and unify this atop an AppSec platform to begin consolidating various legacy tools inherited over time.

When these pillars are observed, security becomes a natural extension of development rather than a bottleneck. Developers are more engaged, risks are reduced earlier in the cycle, and security teams gain the confidence that their policies are being applied consistently.

Realise the Value of Integrated DevSecOps Now Rather Than Later

Integrating AppSec into DevSecOps is not about adding more tools or creating new bottlenecks. It is about rethinking how security can be the natural result of the AI-enabled software development and delivery that's already happening, without compromising on risk tolerance or speed of innovation. By recognising the pitfalls of tool sprawl, conflicting priorities, and poor feedback loops between development and security, and by adopting strategies centred on alignment, velocity, enablement, and scalability, organisations can overcome common obstacles.

At scale, this means coordinating governance, disseminating insight, unifying platforms, and embedding security into every stage of development. When done well, the result is not just safer software, but a development culture where security is seen as an enabler of innovation rather than an impediment. In a world where attackers are faster and more resourceful than ever, integrating AppSec into DevSecOps is essential.