Speed vs. Security is a False Choice: 3 DevSecOps Practices to 'Shift Left' Without Breaking Your Pipeline

Published: 16 January 2026

In many organizations, there is an unspoken but deeply ingrained belief that speed and security are opposing forces. The DevOps team is pushing to accelerate the CI/CD pipeline, deploying new features faster than ever before. The security team, on the other hand, is seen as the brakes, the gatekeepers who are forced to say “no” to prevent insecure code from reaching production. This perceived conflict is the single biggest challenge to a successful DevSecOps transformation.

The result of this friction is predictable. Either security is bypassed in the name of speed, leading to unacceptable risk, or the development process grinds to a halt, waiting for manual security reviews, causing the business to lose its competitive edge. This is a false choice.

A mature DevSecOps practice recognizes that speed and security are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the opposite is true. By building security into the development process from the very beginning—a practice known as “shifting left”—you can actually move faster, with more confidence. The key is to stop treating security as a separate, final step and start treating it as an automated, integrated part of the pipeline. Here are three practical ways to do that.

1. Implement Developer-Centric Security Tooling

The goal of shifting left is to find and fix vulnerabilities as early as possible in the development lifecycle. The cheapest and fastest place to fix a bug is when the developer is still writing the code. To do this, you must empower your developers with tools that provide immediate, actionable security feedback directly within their existing workflow.

• IDE Security Plugins: Modern security tools can plug directly into a developer’s Integrated Development Environment (IDE), such as VS Code. These plugins scan the code in real-time as the developer is writing it, highlighting potential vulnerabilities just like a spell checker highlights a typo.
• Git Pre-Commit Hooks: You can implement automated checks that run every time a developer tries to commit their code. These “pre-commit hooks” can scan for common issues like hard-coded secrets, insecure dependencies, or basic coding errors. If a problem is found, the commit is blocked, forcing the developer to fix the issue before it ever enters the central code repository.

The key to success is to make these tools “developer-centric.” The feedback must be fast, accurate (to avoid “alert fatigue” from false positives), and provide clear guidance on how to fix the problem. When security becomes a seamless part of the developer’s inner loop, it ceases to be a source of friction.

2. Automate Security in the CI/CD Pipeline

The CI/CD pipeline is the engine of modern software delivery, and it is the perfect place to embed automated security controls. The goal is to create a “security-as-code” culture, where your security policies are defined, versioned, and automatically enforced by the pipeline itself.

• Software Composition Analysis (SCA): Your application is not just the code you write; it’s also the hundreds of open-source libraries and dependencies you use. SCA tools automatically scan these dependencies for known vulnerabilities every time you build your application, failing the build if a critical vulnerability is found.
• Static Application Security Testing (SAST): SAST tools analyze your source code for a wide range of security flaws, such as SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and insecure authentication patterns. By integrating SAST into your pull request process, you can ensure that no new vulnerabilities are introduced into your main branch.
• Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST): DAST tools test your running application from the outside-in, just as an attacker would. They can be configured to automatically scan your application in a staging environment after every successful deployment, providing an additional layer of security validation.

By automating these checks in the pipeline, you create a safety net that allows your developers to move quickly. They can have confidence that the pipeline will catch any security issues they may have missed.

3. Build a “Paved Road” with Secure-by-Default Infrastructure

One of the most effective ways to shift left is to make it easy for developers to do the right thing and hard to do the wrong thing. This is the concept of the “paved road.” The security team, in partnership with the platform engineering team, can build a set of pre-approved, hardened, and secure-by-default templates and services.

This “paved road” might include:

• Hardened Base Images: A set of approved base container images that have been scanned for vulnerabilities and configured according to security best practices.
• Secure Infrastructure-as-Code Modules: Reusable Terraform or CloudFormation modules that provision infrastructure with security built-in (e.g., encrypted S3 buckets, restrictive network security groups).
• Standardized CI/CD Pipeline Templates: Pipeline templates that already include all the necessary security scanning and validation steps.

When developers use this paved road, they are automatically inheriting a high level of security without having to be security experts themselves. This frees them up to focus on delivering business value, while giving the security team confidence that the foundational components of the application are secure.

Choosing between speed and security is a relic of an outdated way of thinking. By embracing automation and shifting left, you can create a virtuous cycle where speed and security reinforce each other.

At Aqon, we have deep expertise in both DevOps Transformation and IT Security. We understand how to bridge the gap between these two worlds and build a DevSecOps culture that enables you to deliver secure software at the speed of business.

Ready to break down the wall between speed and security? Contact us today to learn how we can help you implement these shift-left practices in your organization.

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