The dream of DevSecOps has always been resilience. To focus on proactive strategies rather than reactive firefighting; to learn from failures and build something stronger and more flexible in their wake. DevSecOps adoption may have grown, but implementation remains uneven: Many teams struggle to align their security and development workflows into a cohesive system.
This year, organizations have an opportunity to transform not only their workflows, but the fundamental way they address security.
Read on as I explain our perspective on how automation will impact your DevOps security practices in 2025 — and how you can use it to achieve the DevSecOps dream, from AI to the latest trends in DevSecOps.
What is DevSecOps Automation?
DevSecOps automation is the practice of automating security measures in software development and IT operations. DevSecOps automation often includes scanning, dependency checks, configuration management, vulnerability management, patching, incident response, and monitoring.
By automating DevSecOps, organizations can ensure security is baked into every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). Using automation in DevSecOps facilitates scalability, resilience, and compliance with a consistency that would be impossible with manual tactics — especially at the pace and scale of modern enterprise development.
Back to topEssential Strategies for Automating DevSecOps
In this Puppet webinar, author and DevOps thought leader Patrick Debois shares his experiences moving security closer to the beginning of the enterprise SDLC.
DevSecOps automation isn’t just about picking the right tool or process. It’s about creating an ecosystem where automation strengthens workflows and fosters a security-first culture. DevSecOps automation supports the really important strategies that secure every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), like:
Shift Left Security
Because shift left security treats security measures as a parallel process to development rather than a “last check” before deployment, it depends on automation to scan for vulnerabilities, manage secrets, and detect misconfigurations in software and infrastructure early.
Continuous Monitoring
Having the ability to detect inconsistencies early is great — but effective DevSecOps depends on event-driven automation that responds to events like unauthorized changes, dependency shakeups, and configuration drift. Designing your DevSecOps pipelines to scan codebases, container images, and dependencies makes sure you can monitor during every build cycle.
Policy as Code
Add frameworks like Open Policy Agent (OPA) to infrastructure as code tools like Puppet and you get policy as code. The act of writing configurations aligned to your infrastructure policies, including security and compliance measures as part of your DevSecOps, means you can use automation to repeat and enforce those measures across complex infrastructure.
Intelligent Orchestration
Intelligent orchestration connects and coordinates automations across tools and workflows, creating a streamlined approach to threat response and compliance. This seamless coordination helps DevSecOps teams monitor security and compliance events, respond accurately and promptly, and use what they learn to guide their approach when the next issue arises.
For example, security breaches detected by a monitoring tool can trigger remediation workflows automatically. This integration enables organizations to not only respond faster but also use the insights from incidents to fine-tune their processes.
Back to topTrends Likely to Impact DevSecOps in 2025 (and How Automation Helps Capitalize on Them)
Trend #1: Preparing for the Good and Bad of AI in DevSecOps
AI will play a dual role in DevSecOps this year. On the positive side, AI-powered orchestration will enhance threat detection and improve incident response prioritization. For example, machine learning models can flag critical vulnerabilities based on usage patterns or predict the potential impact of a misconfiguration. On the flip side, bad actors have already begun using AI for malicious purposes, such as automating sophisticated penetration attacks, DDoS, and more.
It’s an interesting dynamic because it gives DevSecOps teams one of the most promising tools for enhancing security — and it gives the same tool to attackers to undermine it. Keeping pace with that dynamic will make it crucial for organizations to adopt AI-driven monitoring tools that can keep pace with evolving threat landscapes AND anticipate attacks driven by the same technology.
Trend #2: Embedding Automation in Shift-Left Strategies
While “secure by design” or “secure by default” describe different stages of the software development and distribution lifecycle, they’re both executions of shift-left security as a governing principle. That means they can be — you guessed it — automated. Embedding automation directly into shift-left security practices allows teams to accelerate their workflows while maintaining compliance and risk management.
This year, we’ll see the increased use of sophisticated automation to streamline workflows inside those shift-left strategies. That means static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), and infrastructure as code (IaC) scanning to automate security testing in your CI/CD pipelines; enforcing security policies as code (defining your compliance rules, automating drift detection and remediation); and implementing secure defaults in provisioning (like using Puppet with Terraform) to prevent misconfiguration and vulnerabilities.
Trend #3: Less Finger-Pointing & More Guarantees
The rising adoption of software bills of materials (SBOMs), coupled with regulatory pushes like NIS2 and CMMC, will make supply chain security a critical focus this year. Gone are the days of finger-pointing — regulators now expect organizations of all types to take responsibility for the security of the software they use and the organizations they partner with.
Automation can help DevSecOps teams take ownership of their supply chain security:
- Enforcing Signing & Verification: Policy as code can help ensure code, binary updates, and other software artifacts haven’t been tampered with.
- For example, your policy might block deployment of a container image unless it’s signed and matches the expected checksum.
- Enforcing Security in Dependencies: Your automated policy can enforce the use of secure, compliant versions of dependencies. Integrating with dependency scanning tools (like Snyk) also lets you block the use of dependencies that are outdated or have known vulnerabilities.
Automation can help eliminate the uncertainty that makes supply chain security such a liability, providing audit trails and real-time verification processes for software builds and packages your team relies on.
Trend #4: Hyper-Automation of Compliance
2025 will see compliance frameworks deeply integrated into infrastructure-as-code approaches. Rather than manually validating servers and VMs, organizations will codify compliance standards at every layer with automation. CIS Benchmarks, DISA STIGs, and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework are standard blueprints for cybersecurity — and automated configuration management can incorporate them as a baseline with each new server or VM.
By automatically applying predefined security baselines to new system resources, scaling compliance and security will become a huge competitive advantage across industries. Policies can be enforced continuously and consistently in hybrid environments, saving time and ensuring audit-readiness for standards like GDPR, PCI DSS, and more.
Trend #5: Increased Use of Autonomous Remediation
Expect automation to move from detection to resolution in 2025. When vulnerabilities are detected, systems will autonomously remediate them by rolling back problematic updates, applying patches, or isolating compromised systems without delay.
Incorporating patch management strategies and vulnerability remediation with existing CI/CD workflows puts DevSecOps teams ahead of vulnerabilities while offloading routine tasks and empowering skilled resources to focus on moving fast.
Trend #6: Self-Service — Can More Access Mean Better Security?
Let’s be frank: Distributed teams in large enterprise organizations tend to cut corners to get what they need. Unfortunately, you can’t count on individuals to self-police. Password sharing and ClickOps (risky configuration through GUIs) are just two of the many workarounds your team might use to bypass best practices to meet their deadlines. While it’s great for short-term productivity, that’s cold comfort when you realize that it undermines everything DevSecOps is about.
For example, letting non-experts modify resources directly in the AWS console skips the review and validation processes, bypassing organizational policies and security controls. That’s a recipe for misconfiguration and drift, which can lead to serious security gaps. Not long ago, 23 million files of PII (6.5 TB) were exposed because of a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket.
Secure Self-Service Automation & Configuration: Using Puppet with ServiceNow
Automation improves self-service capabilities by giving teams what they need without ignoring security. Secure self-service with Puppet Enterprise Advanced incorporates granular role-based access control, ensuring consistent, secure provisioning and safeguarding enterprises while enhancing operational efficiency.
Every year, software teams are going to keep getting bigger; their needs are going to become more immediate; and their infrastructure is going to become more complex to keep up with the pace of change. But that doesn’t mean you should be forced to bottleneck your provisioning and configuration processes.
Back to topHow Automation Will Unlock the Dream of DevSecOps in 2025 and Beyond
Firefighters no more: Automation is going to turn DevSecOps into an innovative, value-adding function across enterprise organizations.
Automation is poised to fundamentally transform how DevSecOps operates in 2025. No longer confined to perimeter defense, DevSecOps teams can become key drivers of business value by leveraging automation to create holistic security systems. Whether it’s enforcing risk-based decision-making, enabling secure self-service, or standardizing security compliance, automation allows teams to tackle vulnerabilities proactively.
Automating DevSecOps strategies and tactics gives your teams more time to establish long-term strategies rather than just solving ad hoc problems. It helps them build value while staying ready for threats and vulnerabilities. It can also help your DevSecOps teams ensure more secure practices with less time and effort.
Most importantly, automation is going to enable a shift from component-based security to holistic system security and compliance that lasts while you scale. We call that resilience: Resilience helps you limit the risk of vulnerabilities and prepare for faster, more comprehensive recovery across infrastructure, OSes, apps, databases, networks, and endpoints.
Puppet Enterprise Advanced is the desired state automation platform that enables that kind of resilience, integrating vulnerability data, orchestrating remediation and patching, and helping you predict the impact of code changes before they’re deployed. This ensures enterprise DevSecOps teams can rely on secure, compliant policies that are consistently and automatically enforced and can make deliberate decisions based on how it can move their organization forward — not just on what’s going to do the least damage.
Desired state automation that enforces security and compliance policy as code will be essential to enterprise survival and growth in coming years. It’s the only solution that standardizes security configurations across complex infrastructure so you can add new resources anywhere, confident in the knowledge that each new server, VM, and container will be as secure as the last one.
The future of DevSecOps is closer than you think. See what enterprise-wide desired state automation can do for your SDLC security with a demo of Puppet Enterprise Advanced.