5 Practical Use Cases to Automate Security in DevSecOps

If the last 15 years of DevOps have taught us anything - it’s that automation has enabled much greater safety in engineering. Therefore, securing code without automation isn’t just inefficient—it’s a ticking time bomb for your product’s security & safety. 

As your codebase grows and evolves, manual security processes fall apart. They lead to delays, frustrating developers, and eventually increased security risks, as a result. Developer adoption of security practices is critical for a seamless DevSecOps culture, but let’s be real—devs don’t want more roadblocks. 

The key to fostering a shared responsibility for security is through automation.

Let’s explore five practical use cases where automating security processes can take your DevSecOps practices from good to great. 

We’ll show you how each example can be executed by Jit, which leverages automation to enhance the developer user experience for securing code.

1. Automating Security Testing for Every Code Change

The Challenge: Without automation, code security reviews become inconsistent. Developers are often left in the dark about security issues until much later in the development process, making remediation more time-consuming and complex.

The Risk: Inconsistent testing means vulnerabilities slip through the cracks, leading to security breaches down the line. This is especially risky in fast-moving development cycles where speed is prioritized over security checks.

The Solution: Automating security tests, similar to the way we employ other guardrails and gates throughout our CI/CD processes, ensures every code change is checked for vulnerabilities––no matter how small.

If we take a look at how Jit works, for a concrete example, you can see that security checks are embedded into your CI/CD pipeline, ensuring every pull request is automatically scanned for potential issues before they’re merged to ensure that security flaws are caught before they are pushed to your production codebase.  

This is also true for every code change, which will trigger a security scan. If an issue is detected, developers are notified immediately, allowing for a quick fix without derailing the entire project timeline.



2. Automatically Block Code Changes with Critical Issues Using Branch Protection

The Challenge: Let’s face it, developers don’t love being the gatekeepers for security. Often, what happens without automation, is that human error is inevitable.

With CVE databases and exploits evolving every single day, it’s nearly impossible for critical issues to not slip through. This means that code changes with unresolved vulnerabilities can unknowingly get merged into production codebases.

The Risk: Unchecked vulnerabilities lead to exploitable code in production environments. By enforcing branch protection to automatically block code changes that include critical security issues, it’s possible to prevent insecure code from being merged into main branches. Without automation, this process can be inconsistent and unreliable.

The Solution: Automated branch protection with a tool like Jit ensures that any code with critical security issues is automatically blocked from being merged into the main branch.

This takes the burden off developers, allowing them to focus on coding, while automation handles the gatekeeping and validates code versus lengthy and growing CVE databases.  



In addition, it’s also possible to enforce branch protection rules based on your predefined criteria, blocking any code with security vulnerabilities or issues your security organization has defined as “critical”, from being merged. This is also a good way to enforce policy as code—where only the secure code and code that is approved according to your company’s security policy makes the cut.



3. Auto-Remediation to Resolve Security Issues

The Challenge: Automating the scanning and finding of vulnerabilities is one thing, but resolving them is where most teams struggle.

This causes remediation efforts, more often than not, to get pushed to the back burner, and as a result security debt builds up––and sometimes gets out of control. With the right automations, developers don’t need to be security experts to consistently resolve vulnerabilities. 

The Risk: Delayed remediation of security issues increases the window of opportunity for attackers and also the attack vectors available to them, greatly increasing your attack surface and opening your systems up to risk.

The longer vulnerabilities remain unresolved, the greater the chance they will be exploited. In addition, vulnerabilities left unpatched can often be exploited simultaneously for complex “kill chains”, to escalate privileges and move laterally in your systems.

The Solution: At Jit we understood that while knowledge is power––true resilience is only possible when you automate remediation, as well. 

The problem many developers face is that even if they know a vulnerability exists, they don't know which steps to take to remediate known vulnerabilities.

At times it might be as simple as a patch or configuration change that could easily be automated. So if that’s the case–why not automate remediation? Jit helps you take care of this low-hanging fruit automatically, reducing your security backlog and keeping your team focused on development.



4. Automatically Prioritize Top Risks Based on Runtime Context

The Challenge: Not all code and cloud security "issues" introduce real risk.

If, historically, security scanners would try and find every single possible vulnerability and output hundreds and sometimes thousands of vulnerabilities with every single scan––that was simply impossible to manage and prioritize–– security engineering today has learned that this approach is quite counterproductive.  This created a lot of disruption and noise, oftentimes with little value.

While some vulnerabilities might even seem severe at face value, many times they are rarely exploitable. On the other hand, others may be subtle, yet could be the key to a devastating attack.

Without proper prioritization, teams might waste time fixing low-risk issues while missing the high-risk ones––that aren’t related to some generic severity classification, but more dependent on the actual stack in use and runtime context.

The Risk: Poor risk prioritization actually leads to inefficiency, cognitive overload, poor security hygiene by bypassing scanners that output irrelevant alerts.  This leaves your application vulnerable to the most dangerous attacks.

The Solution: By analyzing runtime context to automatically prioritize the most critical risks, you can ensure your team focuses on the issues that pose the greatest threat to your production environment.

The key is automating this prioritization, so developers aren’t bogged down deciding which vulnerability to address first. The way this works with Jit, is by leveraging runtime data to understand which vulnerabilities pose the highest risk based on how your application is used in production.

It then prioritizes those issues, ensuring your team works on what matters most and what is actually exploitable in the context of your systems.



5. Automatically Send Jira/Slack Tickets When Issues Cross a Specific Risk Threshold

The Challenge: Developers are busy, and sometimes security issues get lost in the noise. Another growing issue is the fact that there are so many dashboards to follow, when your system is a different dashboard to check, developers get dashboard fatigue and check out.

Manually sending reminders or escalating issues takes valuable time away from coding, is nearly impossible to do regularly and consistently enough for it to be effective, and slows down remediation efforts.

The Risk: Security issues that cross critical thresholds without action can lead to breaches or system failures. While at the same time, manual escalation processes are slow and often ineffective.

When developers need to leave the context of their work to check a list, only to come back and try and get back to the flow of their work and fix the issue, adds too much unnecessary friction.  

The Solution: By automating issue reporting based on a defined risk threshold and sending these alerts to the tools developers are already using and like (we didn’t say love…we know!)––Jit ensures that critical vulnerabilities aren’t ignored.

Whether it’s by creating a Jira ticket for you or sending an automatic Slack notification in a pre-defined channel––the security escalation is fully automated, can be logged, monitored, tracked and synced with regular engineering work.

As a result, your team can take immediate action on the most critical security issues, or prioritize them the way they’d prioritize any engineering tasks. 



Security Automation FTW!

Securing code in a high-velocity development environment is pretty much a Sisyphean task—unless you automate it.

By automating critical security functions like scanning, validating, remediation, and risk prioritization, you remove friction from the process and enable your developers to focus on what they do best (and want to be doing)—writing great code. 

Tools like Jit that are focusing on optimizing the developer experience of security, are hoping to make this easier than ever by embedding security into known DevOps processes and within CI/CD pipelines.

The same way that DevOps has removed much of the known and repeatable errors of manual work, security can level up DevSecOps through automation too, and improve security and velocity by orders of magnitude.

So, what are you waiting for? Get started with Jit to improve the developer and security experience when writing and shipping code.