Remember that plastic Fisher-Price Shape Sorter from when you were a kid, where you had to fit different-shaped colorful blocks into their matching slots? And that oddly satisfying moment when the green triangle block slid out of your fingers and landed perfectly into place?

That tiny ASMR-inducing thrill of making all the parts of a system slide seamlessly into their place is alive within every DevOps architect or platform engineer. However, with modern-day DevOps infrastructure, that thrill often dissolves into frustration.

Fragmented security tools that weren’t built for DevOps pipelines, can often refuse to fit neatly into their workflows. But the challenge extends far beyond mismatched tools – it’s a clash of cultures. While developers race to meet relentless delivery deadlines in a cloud-native world, security teams watch their risk exposure expand with every deployment. Both teams remain entrenched in their separate realities, speaking different languages, chasing different goals.

How Serious is the DevSec Dissonance? Industry Data Speaks

In Checkmarx’ December 2024 AppSec Survey, performed by Visible Impact, a division of The Futurum Group, organizations were asked what’s standing in their way of optimal application security. The answers tell a familiar story:

• 38% of respondents say that a top problem they face is the eternal balancing act between speed and security.

• 29% report that making their security tools play nice with DevOps pipelines is a top challenge.

• 19% are wrestling with different processes for different security tools.

• 14% point to the elephant in the room: Poor collaboration between security and development teams

I’m not here to bring you down, of course. There’s a solution, but it’s not a single tool, integration, or a fancy new dashboard. It’s a guiding principle designed to ‘Make It All Work Together.’ – a call for a deep shift in the paradigm of how development and security interplay.

Toll of a Cultural Divide

Security and development evolved as distinct disciplines, each with their own tools, methodologies, and metrics.

Security teams emerged from risk management and compliance, while development teams were born in the age of agile and continuous delivery. Most security tools have been designed with security teams in mind, neglecting the needs of development, and vice versa.

In today’s enterprise environments, where DevSecOps processes have evolved into complex ecosystems, the challenge isn’t just integration – it’s scalability. Security tools that were either developed purely for AppSec professionals, or those designed for small dev team become bottlenecks when scaling up to manage thousands of pipelines, potentially with many different configurations, across multiple development teams.

Most application security tools weren’t designed with enterprise-scale DevOps pipelines in mind, and don’t align with current development and deployment practices. The impact of this misalignment manifests across the entire development ecosystem:

• Developer productivity: The constant context-switching between various tools and the IDE creates delays, breaks flow state and contributes to burnout and fatigue.

• Operational overhead: Managing multiple security tools comes with substantial costs in licensing, integration, maintenance, and operational complexity.

• Knowledge fragmentation: Each tool introduces its own learning curve and best practices. multiplying the burden on all teams involved and complicates security training.

• Risk Visibility Gaps: Without a single source of truth, teams lack visibility into application-level risk, leading to inaccurate risk assessment.

Understanding these challenges is the first step. Now let’s explore what it takes to bridge this divide.

How Do You “Make It All Work Together” in Practice?

Making It All Work Together requires four components: culture, integration, consolidation, and adaptation.

Culture 

Developers need to embrace security as part of their process, another engineering challenge to solve. Equally important, security teams need to embrace DevOps culture, moving away from traditional gated approaches toward automated, pipeline-native security controls that match development velocity.

Integration 

Security controls need to maintain pipeline velocity, work from within the IDE and integrate with developer workflows. Implementations must remain consistent across all pipelines, repositories, and teams, bridging the gap between security and development through shared processes.

Consolidation 

The more AppSec and dev teams are involved, each making their own decisions on which tools they’re going to use and how to use them in their process, the problem of tool sprawl multiplies exponentially. What’s an arguably manageable issue with a small team becomes a chaotic web of incompatibility. That’s why consolidation is imperative.

Consolidating your AppSec tools into one unified platform that covers all stages of the SDLC provides a seamless, developer-centric experience across all teams involved. For consolidation to be effective, the platform must cover everything from code, through supply chain, to cloud and deployment.

Consolidation not only helps streamline current work processes across different tools and teams, but also, equally importantly, facilitates further scalability.

Adaptation  

‘Making it All Work Together’ is a process of progressive change, trial –and-error, and continuous improvement. Monitor how your teams interact with security tools, track key metrics, and fine-tune your approach accordingly.

Who Benefits from “Making It All Work Together”? Everyone

DevOps and Platform Engineering leaders have much to gain here being the ones dealing with the challenge, and the impact ripples across all teams and stakeholders. Let’s break down the benefits:

When Every Piece Clicks into Place

Creating a harmonic environment consolidating security into the SDLC is never about a single tool or process- tweaking. It takes a rethinking at the molecular level about how development and security interact, and while tech itself is not enough, it’s the foundation for change.

Integration and consolidation – two of the four principles of the “Make It All Work Together” mindset – are very much dependent on a unified AppSec platform that can integrate security tools seamlessly into the SDLC, help manage pipeline load and streamline dev and sec collaboration.

Ready to forge a new DevSecOps experience?

Explore how Checkmarx can help:
[checkmarx.com/solutions/devsecops]