Enterprises today must contend with the dual challenge of maintaining robust security while enabling rapid software innovation. As cyberthreats become more sophisticated, the shift left approach to achieving this balance does not go far enough. Development teams need a more comprehensive approach to ensuring rock-solid security throughout the development life cycle, including later stages such as runtime and post-release. For several years, teams have been empowered to shift security left, embedding it earlier in the development process. By building security policies and tooling directly into the software development platform, every application within the portfolio benefits from the same consistent set of guardrails. This approach has ensured uniform compliance with security standards. 

However, the shift left approach has also created new burdens for follow-on teams to manage. As applications move from development to deployment and production, developers’ security efforts do not always follow apps through their journey. 

Beyond Shift Left Security 

When implementing a software development platform, an organization can create templates for security tools and security-compliant workflows with policies baked in. These workflows are applied to projects, and the tools are universally available. Development teams eliminate duplicated efforts and overhead costs, and the business benefits from a proactive, holistic security posture across its entire software portfolio. Security remains everyone’s responsibility, but shifting security up the stack allows for more oversight and consistency across the organization. Most importantly, these security efforts ‘stick’ to a project from the first line of code to production and beyond. 

Advantages of Shifting Security to the Application Layer 

While shift-left security centers on securing code early in the development process, employing a ‘shift-up’ model ensure that security measures extend into later stages, such as deployment, runtime and post-release. Organizations can significantly reduce vulnerabilities that make it to production and are better prepared to mitigate those that do. 

Early integration of security protocols helps ensure that all development activities comply with regulatory requirements, reducing the risk of fines, sanctions and any other negative impacts on the enterprise. More secure software also builds trust among customers, partners and stakeholders, enhancing the organization’s reputation and competitive position. 

Here are three steps that development leaders can implement to evolve shift left security to cover the entire software development life cycle: 

Develop Reusable, Automated Security Analyzers 

Teams should build automated security testing components that are both reusable and adaptable across different projects and application architectures within a continuous integration (CI) environment. For instance, constructing modular components for SAST (static application security testing), DAST (dynamic application security testing), dependency scanning and container scanning ensures consistency and reduces the duplication of efforts.  

By introducing an abstraction layer between analyzers and their pipeline implementations, results can be normalized before reaching development teams. This centralizes control over security rules and configurations and allows updates, replacements or additional analyzers to be integrated seamlessly without causing disruptions or rework downstream. Over time, this approach provides organizations with a more flexible, future-proof security framework that can evolve to meet changing requirements while maintaining a unified, organization-wide security posture. 

Establish Global Security Policies as Guardrails  

Overarching guidelines and protocols should guide and standardize security practices across all projects and teams within an organization. These policies act as guardrails by providing a structured framework, which ensures that projects adhere to a consistent level of security, while still allowing some flexibility to account for project needs or requirements. 

The process begins with defining risk tolerance thresholds. Once these thresholds are set, security policies that align with regulatory requirements or internal compliance standards should be created. These policies should include mandatory tasks automatically applied to all projects, such as running security scans. The policies should be designed in a composable way to facilitate management across the portfolio and allow flexibility to meet diverse requirements. 

Implement Contextual Approval Gating 

Once security policies are enforced across projects, the next step is to prevent code promotion when security tools detect vulnerabilities or unacceptable risks. Results should be communicated to developers and approval gates used only when necessary. For example, if a SAST scanner detects a critical vulnerability, the developer must either resolve it or get approval from the security team before code promotion. Developers can continue without delay If no vulnerabilities are found, or the risk tolerance threshold is met. This approach maintains developer velocity while promoting responsible security practices. 

Conclusion 

Shift-up security transcends shift left by embedding enduring security measures throughout the software development life cycle. It reduces vulnerabilities, ensures compliance and builds trust through reusable security automation, global policies and contextual gating. It marks a proactive, sustainable approach to software development security — one that is crucial if enterprises are to maintain the balance between security and rapid innovation.