DevSecOps blends development, security, and operations into a unified workflow where security is automated, continuous, and built into every stage of the SDLC—not bolted on at the end.

This checklist covers the core best practices every modern engineering org should adopt.

1. Culture & Governance

• Adopt “security as everyone’s responsibility”
• Provide secure coding training for developers
• Establish clear security SLAs & ownership
• Integrate security KPIs into engineering metrics
• Involve security early in design & architecture reviews
• Conduct regular threat modeling & risk assessments
• Align DevSecOps strategy with compliance requirements (SOC 2, ISO, PCI, HIPAA)

2. Secure CI/CD Pipelines

• Implement principle of least privilege for CI/CD runners
• Enforce signed commits & signed container images
• Use ephemeral CI runners to reduce supply-chain risk
• Protect CI secrets via vault-based secret management
• Add security gates for high-risk changes (IaC, auth, network changes)
• Monitor pipeline logs for anomalies or tampering
• Require peer review with security-aware code review checklists

3. Shift-Left Application Security

• Integrate SAST (static analysis) into pull requests
• Add SCA to detect vulnerable third-party libraries
• Enforce dependency pinning & dependency update automation
• Use IDE-based AI or security scanning for developer feedback
• Run IaC scanning for Terraform, CloudFormation, Helm, YAML, etc.
• Validate secret leaks using secret-scanning tools
• Implement threat modeling early in epics & feature planning

4. Secure Build & Artifact Integrity

• Sign artifacts using tools like Cosign or Notary
• Scan images for vulnerabilities before pushing to registries
• Enforce SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) generation
• Store artifacts in a secure, access-controlled registry
• Block deployments of images with known CVEs
• Regularly rotate build credentials & tokens
• Maintain provenance metadata (SLSA, NIST SSDF alignment)

5. Environment & Cloud Security

• Use agentless + agent-based cloud security scanning
• Continuously scan cloud configurations against CSP best practices
• Automate remediation for common misconfigurations
• Enforce network segmentation & zero-trust design
• Scan Kubernetes manifests for misconfigurations (e.g., privileged pods)
• Enforce least privilege on IAM roles, service accounts, and secrets
• Encrypt data in transit and at rest by default
• Prevent public exposure of buckets, disks, APIs, or pipelines
• Use policy-as-code for cloud enforcement (OPA, Kyverno, Checkov)

6. Runtime Security & Observability

• Deploy runtime application protection (RASP, eBPF, WAF, or service mesh)
• Collect logs, metrics, and traces for threat detection
• Monitor sensitive operations & user actions
• Detect real-time anomalies in performance or behavior
• Run continuous DAST and API security checks
• Protect container runtimes (no privilege escalation, read-only FS, seccomp profiles)
• Rotate secrets, keys, and certs on a schedule
• Enable zero-trust identity for apps (mTLS, workload identity)

7. Automated Testing & Quality Gates

• Run unit, integration, and security tests on every commit
• Automate compliance tests for infrastructure and cloud
• Use chaos engineering for resilience testing
• Add fuzz testing for critical inputs or APIs
• Enforce security test coverage thresholds
• Use policy-based approvals for risky changes

8. Vulnerability Management & Prioritization

• Centralize vulnerability findings from SAST, SCA, DAST, IaC, and cloud
• Prioritize based on exploitability, reachability, and business impact
• Automate patching for libraries & container bases
• Track vulnerability SLAs by asset sensitivity
• Perform regular p99/p95 MTTR reviews
• Integrate risk scoring tools (EPSS, CVSS, reachability analysis)

9. Supply Chain Security

• Validate external dependencies before adoption
• Require code signing and provenance for internal + external libraries
• Isolate third-party code in sandboxed environments
• Scan pipelines, registries, code repos, and build systems
• Use infrastructure drift detection to spot unauthorized changes
• Adopt SLSA levels as guardrails for pipeline trust

10. Incident Response & Resilience

• Maintain an up-to-date IR plan integrated with DevOps workflows
• Automate alerting → triage → response workflows
• Use runbooks for common failure scenarios
• Perform blameless postmortems
• Regularly test failover and backup recovery
• Track incidents and anomalies centrally
• Ensure service ownership is clearly defined

11. Continuous Improvement (DevSecOps Maturity)

• Conduct quarterly maturity assessments
• Review bottlenecks in CI/CD security processes
• Align engineering productivity & security metrics
• Update policies as architecture evolves (cloud, serverless, APIs)
• Invest in automation before adding more headcount
• Integrate AI tools for code review, security triage, and threat modeling
• Measure outcomes, not tools: MTTR, escape rate, compliance pass rate, SLO/SLA adherence

Printable DevSecOps Best Practices Checklist (Quick-Use)

Culture & Governance

• Security training
• SLAs defined
• Early security involvement

Secure CI/CD

• Secrets management
• Signed commits/images
• Ephemeral runners

Shift-Left Security

• SAST/SCA/IaC scanning
• Secrets scanning
• Threat modeling

Artifact Security

• SBOM
• Registries secured
• Prevent CVE-heavy builds

Cloud Security

• IAM least privilege
• Cloud config scanning
• Kubernetes security

Runtime Security

• Observability
• DAST/API testing
• Container hardening

Supply Chain

• Dependency validation
• Build pipeline integrity
• Drift detection

IR & Resilience

• Automated alerting
• Runbooks
• Postmortems

Continuous Improvement

• Quarterly reviews
• Metric-driven iteration
• Process automation

Conclusion

DevSecOps is not a set of tools—it’s a culture of continuous, automated security woven into software delivery.

The checklist above gives teams a practical framework for achieving secure, fast, and reliable development at scale.

Organizations that implement these best practices see:

• Reduced vulnerabilities
• Faster remediation
• Lower operational risk
• Stronger cloud security posture
• Higher developer productivity

DevSecOps is the future of secure software delivery—and with the right practices, you can get there faster and safer.