Shift Left Explained: What It Means to Shift Security Left

Main takeaways from this article:

• Shift-left security integrates protections into the earliest stages of the SDLC, catching vulnerabilities upfront.

• Early detection from shifting left reduces costs, shortens production timelines, and strengthens applications from the get-go.

• Challenges like noisy alerts, competing priorities, and skill gaps require collaboration, automation, and unified policies.

• Automating security testing and training dev teams fosters a proactive culture where security leads, not lags.

• Wiz simplifies shift-left strategies with agentless scanning, code-to-cloud traceability, and actionable guidance.

What is shift-left security?

Shift-left security is the practice of performing code and software security assurance processes as early as possible in the software development lifecycle (SDLC). 

Within a typical DevOps flow (Plan > Code > Build > Test > Deploy > Monitor) shift-left security dives into the early stages: Plan, Code, and Test. Why? It’s all about catching vulnerabilities and misconfigurations before they snowball, saving money, improving code quality, and creating stronger defenses from the get-go.

This approach empowers developers to tackle issues head-on, right when they’re writing or designing code. By handing the tools and responsibility to developers, they can help pinpoint and fix vulnerabilities before they make their way into production.

And it’s not just about security anymore. The “everything as code” (EaC) movement, along with the rise of DevOps and DevSecOps, has shifted a range of processes left. From database administration and compliance checks to automated testing and infrastructure provisioning, more roles are being integrated earlier—closer to the core design and development stages.

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Benefits of shift left security in the software development process

The shift-left approach offers a number of advantages over traditional security processes, in which security is addressed only after the product has been released.

1. Lower cost of remediation

Fixing vulnerabilities and misconfigurations prior to deployment helps to reduce the overall threat footprint by making it less likely for vulnerabilities to find their way into production environments or public-facing services. This saves both time and resources.

2. Faster time to market

The later in the delivery pipeline a security issue is detected, the greater the chance it could delay your application’s release. With the right security automation in your pipeline, you can detect, prioritize, and mitigate security vulnerabilities as soon as they are added to the codebase—as opposed to discovering them later on in the SDLC, when they could negatively impact time to market.

3. Improved overall security posture

By shifting security left, you can create more secure code and better protect the data your application needs to access. Automating compliance and security testing, setting guardrails, and equipping developers with the right security tools from the very start of the development process all help to ensure your applications are resilient against attacks and that sensitive data is protected every step of the way.

4. Increased user trust

Maintaining client and user trust is critical for the success of any business, but especially in the financial and healthcare sectors. Breaches, leaks, and even unexploited vulnerabilities in production environments can have devastating effects on brand reputation. By strictly enforcing predefined security controls earlier in the SDLC, you can prevent costly breaches. End users will also be more likely to trust your application with their sensitive information.

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The challenges of shifting security left

Despite the many benefits of adopting a shift-left security approach, many organizations have yet to fully embrace it. According to one survey, for example, only 37% of organizations reported having extensively incorporated security into DevOps processes. There can be a number of obstacles to overcome in order to implement effective shift-left security assurance processes. 

1. Prioritization and cultivating a security-first culture 

The productivity of engineering and dev teams is often measured in the number of pull requests they create or how frequently they deliver new features. But shifting security left requires different performance metrics focused on vulnerability prevention and early remediation, which should be rewarded and encouraged.

2. Siloed tooling

Because the tools information security teams use are vastly different in both scope and function from those used by software and infrastructure engineers, security teams often lack visibility into potential risks introduced by developers. Developers, on the other hand, have limited visibility into the potential security repercussions of their coding decisions, and often lack the context and knowledge necessary for fast remediation.

3. Skill shortage

The gap between engineering and information security teams goes beyond tooling. Most friction stems from a lack of agreed-upon processes and the failure to involve InfoSec in the development process from “day zero” in order to enable effective cross-team collaboration.

4. Alert fatigue and tool sprawl

The sheer number of disparate tools and vendors is yet another challenge of application security. With all of these producing security alerts without context or prioritization, this can lead to alert fatigue. Plus, the overhead of orchestrating so many security tools can create bottlenecks and delay discovery and remediation of issues. With so many organizations plagued by this problem, it’s no surprise a Gartner survey revealed that 75% of businesses in 2022 had prioritized consolidating their vendor security tools to eliminate alert noise.

Implementing shift left security: five best practices

Shifting security left is about catching vulnerabilities early, before they sneak into production and cause issues. But how do you make it work in real life? Here are five practical tips:

1. Establish clear security policies and guidelines: Define security requirements upfront, and make sure every developer is in the loop. Simple, clear guidelines create consistency, so everyone’s on the same page from day one.

2. Automate security testing and processes: Nobody likes repetitive tasks, so let tools handle them. Automate security scans in your CI/CD pipeline to catch vulnerabilities without slowing the pace. Think of continuous checks, not one-off inspections.

3. Implement security fixes during code development: Why wait for testing to find a bug? Encourage developers to address vulnerabilities as they write code. It’s faster, cheaper, and saves a ton of headaches down the line.

4. Train developers on secure coding practices: Developers aren’t born knowing how to write secure code. Offer hands-on training and resources to help them spot and squash vulnerabilities while they work.

5. Collaborate between security and development teams: Break down silos and get security and development teams working together. Share insights, align goals, and make security a collaborative effort—not an afterthought.

Exploring shift-left security tools

Shifting left is about having the right tools to back you up. Here’s a toolkit that gets the job done:

• Static Application Security Testing (SAST): Scans source code and configuration files to catch vulnerabilities before your app even runs.

• Dynamic Application Security Testing (DAST): Tests applications in real-time, finding issues like injection flaws or XSS during runtime.

• Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP): Monitors and blocks threats while your app is live.

• Interactive Application Security Testing (IAST): Blends SAST and DAST to give precise, ongoing vulnerability detection throughout the lifecycle.

• Web Application Firewall (WAF): Stops harmful HTTP requests in their tracks, keeping your web apps safe from malicious traffic.

• Software Composition Analysis (SCA): Checks third-party and open-source libraries for vulnerabilities, so you’re not caught off guard.

• Secrets Scanning: Finds sensitive info like API keys or credentials hiding in your code, reducing exposure risks.

• Container/Workload Scanning: Secures containerized apps during rest and runtime, using tools like CWPP and KSPM to lock things down.

• Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM): Gives you full visibility into your cloud environment, highlighting misconfigurations and potential threats.

The Wiz approach to implementing shift-left security

Wiz makes shifting security left feel achievable by embedding security at the start of your software development lifecycle (SDLC) to help teams catch vulnerabilities early, build secure applications, and ship faster without cutting corners. Here’s how it works:

1. Gain visibility into burning security issues

Using a single cloud-native API connector, Wiz agentless scanning technology continuously assesses the security of your workloads, giving you complete visibility into your threat landscape and eliminating the need for ongoing maintenance.

Wiz’s comprehensive scanning technology covers PaaS resources, virtual machines, containers, serverless functions, public buckets, data volumes, and databases. Combined with contextual insights, security teams can proactively identify, prioritize, and remediate threats in each layer.

2. Employ a single security policy from build to runtime

With visibility into your application security posture, you can begin to define a unified source-to-production policy for your engineering and InfoSec teams alike in order to break down tooling and organizational silos.

Wiz Guardrails enables a single-policy framework for orchestrating security controls and processes in your CI/CD pipeline as well as the deployment of resources in your Kubernetes cluster. This gives your security teams centralized control while empowering your developers to deliver secure code.

3. Automate risk prevention

Wiz Code seamlessly integrates with development workflows to supercharge your shift-left security strategy. Key features include:

• Agentless scanning for early risk detection: Agentless scanning highlights vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and compliance gaps in code repositories, container images, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates before they go live.

• Seamless developer integration: Integrated directly into IDEs and repositories, Wiz Code makes it easy for developers to fix issues as they write, saving time and cutting costs down the road.

• Cloud-to-code traceability: With cloud-to-code traceability, you can map security threats back to specific lines of code or teams, creating accountability and accelerating fixes.

• Actionable insights for rapid remediation: Contextual insights and prioritized fixes ensure your team knows exactly what to address—and how to do it fast.

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