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Secure software development lifecycle (SSDLC)
We work with your engineering organisation to define the security activities at each lifecycle phase. The output is an SSDLC playbook your team owns:
What we do
DevSecOps & Secure Supply Chain
Security as a property of how you build software, not a checkpoint at the end.
For most software organisations, security still arrives late — in the form of a penetration test result, a failed compliance audit, or an exposed vulnerability that someone has to hot-patch on a Friday evening.
DevSecOps changes the placement of security from "at the end" to "throughout." But making that shift work is not about buying tools.
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What we help you build
We work with your teams to design, codify, and operate a DevSecOps practice that covers the full software lifecycle. By the end of an engagement, the foundations below live in your repos, your pipelines, and your team's heads.
A secure-by-design SSDLC with explicit security activities at every phase: design, development, build, deploy, operate
Pipeline-integrated security gates that surface issues to the right engineer at the right time, without blocking legitimate work
A software supply chain you can audit — SBOM generation, dependency provenance, signed artifacts, reproducible builds
Secrets management and identity isolation that scales beyond ad-hoc environment variables
Runtime security and detection with threat models tuned to your actual architecture
A documentation-first knowledge base — ADRs, runbooks, threat models, response playbooks — so the team owns the practice, not just the tools
Principles: how we approach DevSecOps
We start by making the principles explicit, because the tooling choices follow from them.
1.
Shift security left, but also distribute it
Security should not be a separate team's job, nor should it be every developer's full-time responsibility. We define clear ownership boundaries: what the platform team enforces, what individual squads own, what the security team reviews.
2.
Automate the floor, not the ceiling
Automated gates catch the most common, well-understood issues. Human review focuses on novel architectural decisions and threat-model implications. We make sure your team has both.
3.
Threat models are living artefacts, not annual exercises
We help you adopt a lightweight threat-modeling practice that engineers can run as part of design work — not as a one-off compliance task.
4.
Compliance is a property, not a project
HIPAA, SOC 2, GDPR, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001 — each adds requirements, but the underlying controls are largely the same. We design controls once and map them to multiple frameworks.
5.
Supply chain is part of the system
Modern applications inherit risk from every dependency, container base image, and CI plugin. We treat the supply chain as part of the architecture, not as someone else's problem.
What we help you build, in detail
Design phase
Lightweight threat-modelling templates, security review triggers, secure-by-design patterns library
Development phase
Secure coding standards by language and platform, pre-commit hooks, IDE security plugins
Build phase
SAST, dependency scanning, secret detection, container image scanning, license compliance
Deploy phase
Infrastructure-as-code scanning, policy-as-code (OPA / Conftest), admission controllers
Operate phase
Runtime detection, audit logging, incident response runbooks, posture monitoring
For each activity, we define: what runs, who owns the outcome, what counts as "pass", and what to do when it fails.
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Pipeline-integrated security gates
Most teams that try DevSecOps end up with pipelines that are either noisy and ignored, or so strict that engineers route around them. We help you avoid both extremes.
Risk-tiered gates: different rules for different services. A public-facing API has stricter gates than an internal scheduled job
Triage built into the pipeline: automatic ticket creation for findings above a threshold, with ownership assigned
Fast feedback: scans tuned to run quickly on every PR; deeper scans run on main
Override paths with audit trails: when a finding must be deferred, the override is recorded, expires, and is visible
3
Secure software supply chain
This is where most organisations have the largest hidden risk. We help you build a supply chain you can audit and trust:
SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) generation for every artifact, in SPDX or CycloneDX format
Dependency provenance and pinning to avoid surprise upgrades
Container base image governance — a small set of trusted, scanned, regularly updated base images
Signed artifacts and verified deployments (Sigstore / Cosign, in-toto attestations)
Build environment hardening — ephemeral build agents, minimal permissions, no long-lived secrets in CI
These practices satisfy SLSA Level 2 and 3 requirements, which are increasingly referenced in enterprise procurement and government contracts.
4
Secrets, identity, and access
We help you move from ad-hoc secrets to a managed, auditable model:
Secrets management
for production, replacing standing admin privileges
Workload identity
instead of static credentials — IAM roles for service accounts, OIDC for CI/CD.
Just-in-time access
for production, replacing standing admin privileges
Audit logging
for every secret access and elevated permission
5
Runtime security and detection
The runtime story matters because most real attacks happen in production, not in builds:
Threat detection tuned to your architecture — Falco for Kubernetes, GuardDuty / Defender for cloud
Audit log aggregation with tamper-evident storage where compliance requires it (HIPAA, SOC 2)
Incident response runbooks for the most likely incident types — suspected breach, supply chain compromise, key exposure
Tabletop exercises to validate the runbooks before you need them
How we work with your teams
DevSecOps is not a side project. It only sticks if it lives inside your real delivery work. Our senior specialists embed alongside your platform, application, and security engineers, and
Co-build the pipeline gates on your actual pipelines, not in a sandbox
Lead threat-modelling sessions for real upcoming features, while training your engineers to lead future sessions
Author ADRs for every significant security architecture decision, so the rationale survives team changes
Run incident response drills with your team, not just for them
Mentor leads until your security and platform leads can own the practice
Because our team is senior-only, the knowledge flow is direct: your engineers see not just what we do, but how we think about it.
Why this matters (multi-stakeholder view)
CTO / CISO
A defensible security posture you can describe to auditors, customers, and the board — backed by automated evidence rather than manual collection.
A defensible security posture you can describe to auditors, customers, and the board — backed by automated evidence rather than manual collection.
VP Engineering / Head of Engineering
A pipeline that catches real issues without burning team velocity, and a clear ownership model so security work doesn't fall through cracks.
A pipeline that catches real issues without burning team velocity, and a clear ownership model so security work doesn't fall through cracks.
Platform & Security teams
Tooling that integrates with your existing stack, runbooks that match your real architecture, and ADRs that capture the trade-offs you'd otherwise re-litigate every quarter.
Tooling that integrates with your existing stack, runbooks that match your real architecture, and ADRs that capture the trade-offs you'd otherwise re-litigate every quarter.
Engineering teams
Security guidance that actually fits the code they're writing — and feedback in the PR, not three months later in a pen-test report.
Security guidance that actually fits the code they're writing — and feedback in the PR, not three months later in a pen-test report.
Compliance & Legal
Controls designed once and mapped to multiple frameworks (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001), with evidence that builds itself.
Controls designed once and mapped to multiple frameworks (SOC 2, HIPAA, GDPR, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001), with evidence that builds itself.
When to bring us in
DevSecOps & Secure Supply Chain is especially valuable when you are:
Every major feature or refactor depends on the vendor’s architects and seniors.
Code is handed over, but architecture decisions, domain trade-offs and delivery know-how stay outside.
Your internal team becomes “implementers around the edges” rather than owners.
Vendor costs increase with each new project; switching vendors looks risky and expensive.
Preparing for SOC 2, HIPAA, ISO 27001, or PCI-DSS
and want controls baked into engineering, not bolted on at audit time
Selling to enterprise customers
whose procurement teams require SBOM, signed artifacts, or SLSA-level attestations
Coming out of a security incident
and want to rebuild practices, not just patch the immediate hole
Scaling past 5–10 engineering squads
and finding that security guidance no longer reaches everyone consistently
Migrating to cloud-native
and seeing that your previous security model doesn't translate
If you recognise any of these, this capability area is likely the right starting point.
F. A. Q.
How long does a DevSecOps engagement typically take?
A meaningful DevSecOps practice takes 6–9 months to build to self-sufficiency. The first 3 months focus on pipeline gates and SSDLC playbook. Months 4–6 cover supply chain, secrets, and runtime. Months 7–9 are transition and CoE handover. Shorter engagements (e.g. 12 weeks) focus on audit preparation but do not produce full capability transfer.
Do we need to adopt specific tools?
No. We work with your existing pipeline stack (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, Argo, CircleCI) and your existing cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure). Tooling choices follow from your architecture, not the other way around.
How does this differ from a traditional security audit?
A security audit tells you what's wrong. A DevSecOps engagement changes how you build software so the same problems don't recur. Audits produce a report; we produce a practice your team owns.
Can you help us pass SOC 2 or HIPAA on a deadline?
Yes, but with a caveat. We can prioritise the controls and evidence collection required for a specific audit. But we will not build a "compliance theater" that passes the audit and fails six months later. Our engagement always includes the underlying capability transfer.
What's the difference between DevSecOps and platform engineering?
Significant overlap. Platform engineering provides the paved road; DevSecOps ensures that road has the right safety properties baked in. In practice, we often deliver them together — see Platform Engineering.
Find out where your DevSecOps practice has gaps
In a 4-week Blueprint Sprint, we map your current SSDLC, pipeline gates, supply chain posture, and incident readiness — then design a capability-first roadmap your team can start running immediately.
Start your Blueprint Sprint