Finding a vulnerability in production costs far more than preventing it at design time, in effort, in exposure and in schedule. DevSecOps is the practice of moving security work to where it is cheapest and most effective.
The cost curve of defects
A flaw caught in a design review takes a conversation to fix. The same flaw found after release requires a patch, a redeployment, customer notification and possibly a regulatory report. The curve is steep and well understood.
Security as a shared responsibility
In a shift-left model developers own secure coding, build engineers own pipeline controls and security specialists own tooling, standards and review. Nobody is the sole gatekeeper.
What changes in practice
Threat modelling joins design meetings, static analysis runs on every commit, dependency checks block known-vulnerable libraries and security tests sit alongside unit tests.
Action step
Trace one security defect your team fixed recently back to the phase where it was introduced. Estimate how much effort a fix at that phase would have taken instead.
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