5 Challenges to Implementing DevSecOps and How to Overcome Them

Introduction

In today’s fast-paced software development environment, integrating security into every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is essential. DevSecOps—a natural evolution of DevOps—builds a culture where security is a shared responsibility among development, security, and operations teams. Despite its clear benefits, many organizations face challenges when attempting to implement DevSecOps practices.

This post discusses five key challenges that organizations face when moving to DevSecOps. It provides practical strategies to overcome these hurdles and offers actionable insights along with real-world examples and relevant code samples. Whether you’re just beginning your DevSecOps journey or looking to refine your process, this guide will help you align security practices with business objectives and technical workflows.

What is DevSecOps?

DevSecOps embeds security into every stage of the SDLC—from planning and coding to deployment and maintenance. Unlike traditional approaches where security was added at the end, DevSecOps champions proactive security measures integrated across all phases.

Key characteristics:

Iterative & Incremental Development — smaller steps, CI for quality.
Continuous Feedback — metrics from automated tools, tests, and stakeholders.
Automation Emphasis — CI/CD pipelines automate security testing, code scanning, deployment.
All-Stakeholder Engagement — aligns security with business needs, technical requirements, and compliance.
Transparency & Traceability — lifecycle visibility to build trust and accountability.

With DevSecOps in place, expect faster deployments, fewer vulnerabilities, and lower total costs.

Key Benefits of DevSecOps

Reduced Security Errors & Cost — detect early, fix cheaper, minimize downtime.
Faster Time-to-Market — continuous testing and feedback streamline releases.
Better Quality & Stability — automation reduces human error.
Cost Efficiency — early remediation is far cheaper than post-release fixes.
Improved Collaboration — shared responsibility across Dev, Sec, and Ops.

Challenge #1: Lack of Security Assurance

Ensuring security practices reflect business objectives and technical requirements is critical. Security assurance must be addressed at industry, business, and project levels.

Industry & Business-Level Concerns

Different industries have distinct standards (e.g., finance, healthcare). Where standards are absent or evolving, orgs may have to build practices in isolation.

How to respond:

Participate in industry consortia or informal working groups.
Network and share lessons learned at conferences.
Start now with a risk-based approach aligned to your business drivers.

Example: Companies in emerging tech can form regional working groups to establish baseline practices before formal regulations exist.

Project-Level Assurance

Aligning project security with business goals is hard. If security comes after coding, remediation costs soar.

Strategies:

Include security requirements early in planning.
Use continuous security tools for automatic scans and vuln checks.
Run regular code reviews with security focus; iterate on feedback.

Sample Bash Command (Code Scanning with Trivy):

#!/bin/bash
# Scan a Docker image for security vulnerabilities using Trivy
IMAGE_NAME="your-application-image:latest"
echo "Starting security scan of ${IMAGE_NAME}..."
trivy image "${IMAGE_NAME}"
echo "Security scan completed."

Automate scans in CI/CD so security is intrinsic to the lifecycle.

Challenge #2: Organizational Barriers

DevSecOps requires breaking down silos between Dev, Sec, and Ops. Barriers arise from culture, collaboration gaps, or incompatible tools.

Breaking Down Silos

Developers may see security as an external mandate. Shift the mindset: security is everyone’s responsibility.

Recommendations:

Hold cross-functional meetings (Dev+Sec+Ops) to clarify roles and expectations.
Run training sessions on integrated approaches.
Adopt shared dashboards and tools for transparent tracking.
Create a common language to discuss risk and mitigations.

Aligning Tools & Processes

Tool clashes between Dev and Sec are common. Integration requires planning and sometimes new tech.

How to align:

Choose tools with interoperable APIs and integration support.
Prefer containerized components to glue ecosystems.
Build centralized logging/monitoring to consolidate insights.

Real-life Example: A bank adopted a shared incident-response dashboard tied to CI/CD, enabling real-time tracking and faster remediation.

Challenge #3: Impact to Quality with Increasing Complexity

As systems grow, security everywhere gets harder. Teams often trade feature speed for security depth, creating risk.

Balancing Quality & Security

Speed and innovation can clash with secure coding discipline, affecting reliability and trust.

Steps:

Shift left — embed security earlier in the SDLC.
Automate tests & CI to catch issues sooner.
Use incremental development to isolate and fix smaller issues.
Enforce version control & change tracking for traceability.

Mitigating Complexity Risk

Adopt microservices so security is enforced per service, avoiding single monolith blast-radius.

Real-World Example: A health-tech firm segmented legacy + modern systems into services and applied service-specific security reviews, reducing risk while maintaining rapid feature delivery.

Challenge #4: Lack of Security Skills Across Teams

Security skill shortages affect not just security teams but also developers, stakeholders, and auditors.

Addressing the Talent Gap

Developers may have limited security exposure; stakeholders may not grok technical nuances.

Actions:

Provide regular training (basics → threat modeling).
Run hands-on workshops/simulations.
Incentivize certifications.
Encourage cross-functional reviews and mentoring in secure coding.

Building a Shared Security Culture

Make security everyone’s job. Shared understanding increases participation.

Real-World Example: An e-commerce company hosts monthly security hackathons (Dev+QA+Sec) to find/fix vulns—boosting posture and collaboration.

Challenge #5: Insufficient Security Guidance & Resources

Even with good intentions, many orgs lack concrete guidance due to resource limits. Without standards and actionable data, comprehensive practices lag.

Overcoming Resource Constraints

Security frameworks need investment, but progress is possible even with limits:

Adopt open-source security tools in the pipeline.
Join industry communities to share best practices.
Leverage vendor guidance and benchmarks (e.g., NIST, ISO 27001).

Continuous Improvement Plan

Avoid one-size-fits-all. Evolve with threats:

Update guidelines as trends shift.
Create a feedback loop across the SDLC to see where vulns enter.
Use metrics/KPIs to track effectiveness and adjust in real time.

Real-World Example: A mid-sized SaaS with no dedicated Sec team combined open-source scanners + cloud governance and a continuous improvement plan, consulting external experts to build a solid framework.

Real-World Examples & Practical Code Samples

Integrate scans and process their output for analysis—automation + tooling bridges gaps.

Bash: Scanning Commands (Trivy)

#!/bin/bash
# filename: security_scan.sh

# Ensure the scanner is installed (assume Trivy)
command -v trivy >/dev/null 2>&1 || {
  echo >&2 "Trivy is not installed. Please install Trivy and try again."
  exit 1
}

# Define the image to scan
IMAGE_NAME="your-application-image:latest"

echo "Scanning Docker image: ${IMAGE_NAME}..."
# Execute vulnerability scanning (JSON output for downstream parsing)
SCAN_RESULTS=$(trivy image "${IMAGE_NAME}" --severity HIGH,CRITICAL --format json)
SCAN_EXIT_CODE=$?

if [ ${SCAN_EXIT_CODE} -ne 0 ]; then
  echo "Vulnerability scan failed with exit code ${SCAN_EXIT_CODE}."
  exit 1
fi

# Save the JSON output to a file for further analysis
OUTPUT_FILE="scan_results.json"
echo "${SCAN_RESULTS}" > "${OUTPUT_FILE}"
echo "Scan completed successfully. Results saved to ${OUTPUT_FILE}."

What it shows:

Automating vuln scans in CI/CD.
Capturing machine-readable JSON for downstream analysis.

Python: Parsing Trivy JSON Output

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import json
from pathlib import Path

def load_scan_results(file_path: str) -> dict:
    path = Path(file_path)
    if not path.exists():
        raise FileNotFoundError(f"{file_path} does not exist.")
    return json.loads(path.read_text(encoding="utf-8"))

def summarize_vulnerabilities(scan_data: dict) -> list[dict]:
    vulns = []
    for result in scan_data.get("Results", []):
        for v in result.get("Vulnerabilities", []) or []:
            vulns.append({
                "VulnerabilityID": v.get("VulnerabilityID"),
                "Severity": v.get("Severity"),
                "PkgName": v.get("PkgName"),
                "InstalledVersion": v.get("InstalledVersion"),
                "FixedVersion": v.get("FixedVersion") or "N/A",
            })
    return vulns

def main():
    file_path = "scan_results.json"
    try:
        data = load_scan_results(file_path)
    except FileNotFoundError as e:
        print(f"Error: {e}")
        return

    vulns = summarize_vulnerabilities(data)

    if not vulns:
        print("No vulnerabilities found.")
        return

    print("Vulnerabilities found:")
    for v in vulns:
        print(f"- [{v['Severity']}] {v['VulnerabilityID']} in {v['PkgName']} "
              f"(Installed: {v['InstalledVersion']}, Fixed: {v['FixedVersion']})")

if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

What it shows:

Parsing JSON output from scanners.
Summarizing by severity with remediation hints (fixed version).

Both samples are modular and fit into larger CI/CD flows—illustrating the DevSecOps principle that automation reinforces continuous security.

Conclusion & Next Steps

In today’s dynamic threat landscape, integrating security into development isn’t optional—it’s mandatory. DevSecOps ensures security is an integral part of software development and operations, not an afterthought.

Recap:

Security assurance (industry→business→project) improves with early, risk-based integration and continuous monitoring.
Organizational barriers fall with stronger collaboration, shared tools, and culture change.
Complexity requires balancing speed with robust practices (microservices, incremental change).
Skills gaps shrink via training, mentoring, and a shared security mindset.
Limited resources can be offset with open-source tools and a continuous improvement plan.

Next Steps:

Audit your SDLC and identify security gaps.
Invest in training; foster cross-team collaboration.
Integrate automated security scanning into CI/CD.
Track metrics; iterate continuously.

DevSecOps is a continuous journey of learning, improvement, and collaboration. Use this guide as your roadmap to overcome common challenges and embed security into every commit, build, and deploy.

References

Carnegie Mellon University, Software Engineering Institute. “5 Challenges to Implementing DevSecOps and How to Overcome Them.” (2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.58012/fywc-yq50
NIST. “Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity.” https://www.nist.gov/cyberframework
Trivy — Vulnerability Scanner for Containers and Artifacts. https://github.com/aquasecurity/trivy
OWASP — OWASP Top Ten. https://owasp.org/www-project-top-ten/

Happy coding and secure deployments!

5 Challenges to Implementing DevSecOps and How to Overcome Them

Take Your Cybersecurity Career to the Next Level