Cloud-native DevSecOps
An engineering-led technology company running its product entirely on containers, Kubernetes, and public cloud infrastructure, where a small platform or security engineering team embeds controls directly into CI/CD pipelines rather than running a traditional SOC, and developers are expected to fix what their own pipeline flags.
Security built into the delivery pipeline rather than bolted on afterward: cloud posture and infrastructure-as-code scanning, container image and runtime protection, SAST/SCA/DAST wired into pull requests, short-lived infrastructure credentials instead of standing secrets, and lightweight automation — leaving the traditional endpoint and email layers thin because this org's real attack surface is the cloud and the pipeline.
The stack, layer by layer
All 10 defense layers, in order — what this team chose, why, and what they left for later.
- 01
Identity & Access
Okta Workforce Identity CloudOkta$$Gives engineers single sign-on into the dozens of developer and cloud-console tools a cloud-native team accumulates, without asking a small platform team to build and maintain that integration work itself.
TeleportTeleportFreemiumReplaces standing SSH keys to production infrastructure with short-lived certificates issued per session, a natural fit for a team that already thinks in ephemeral, code-defined infrastructure rather than long-lived servers.
HashiCorp VaultHashiCorpFreemiumIssues short-lived, dynamically generated database and cloud credentials on demand instead of static secrets checked into a config file, directly addressing the secrets-sprawl risk a fast-moving engineering team is prone to.
- 02
Endpoint Protection
Not covered
No endpoint protection selected — malicious activity on laptops and servers may go undetected.
- 03
Network Security
TwingateTwingateFreemiumGives engineers per-application access to internal services and VPCs without a VPN appliance to run or a public IP to expose, matching a team that would rather manage access as code than manage network hardware.
- 04
Email Security
Not covered
No email security selected — phishing and malicious email remain common initial-access paths.
- 05
Cloud Security
WizWiz$$$Agentless, API-based scanning fits a team that doesn't want to instrument every workload with another agent, building one graph of posture, workload, and identity risk across however many cloud accounts the product runs in.
CheckovPalo Alto NetworksFreeScans Terraform and Kubernetes manifests for misconfiguration before anything is ever deployed, catching the kind of mistake this team would rather fail a CI check on than discover in production.
TrivyAqua SecurityFreeA single free scanner covering container images, IaC, and exposed secrets slots directly into the same CI pipeline that already builds and ships every container, with no separate console for developers to check.
FalcoCommunity projectFreeWatches Linux kernel system calls at runtime to catch what static scanning can't — a shell spawning in a production pod, an unexpected outbound connection — complementing Trivy's pre-deployment checks with detection once containers are actually running.
- 06
Application Security
SemgrepSemgrepFreemiumFast, pattern-based scanning with rules developers can read and write themselves fits an engineering-led team that wants to own its own SAST rules rather than depend on a security team's black-box ruleset.
Snyk Open SourceSnykFreemiumFlags vulnerable dependencies directly in the same CLI and CI step engineers already run, keeping SCA inside the developer's existing workflow instead of a separate security-team dashboard.
StackHawkStackHawk$$Configured with a file checked into the repository and run as an automatic CI step, it makes dynamic API testing feel like any other build check instead of a manual scan kicked off by a separate team.
- 07
Data Protection
AWS Key Management ServiceAmazon Web ServicesFreemiumNative, pay-as-you-go key management wired directly into the same cloud services — S3, RDS, EBS — the product already runs on, without standing up a separate encryption platform.
- 08
Detection & Response
Datadog Cloud SIEMDatadog$$Analyzes the same logs the team already sends to Datadog for observability, so security detection rides on infrastructure this team runs anyway instead of standing up and paying for a second telemetry pipeline.
ShuffleShuffleFreeA free, self-hosted SOAR lets a small platform-security team automate alert response without a dedicated automation engineer or a SOAR license line item.
- 09
Resilience & Recovery
VeleroCommunity projectFreeThis team's production state is its Kubernetes clusters, so its backups have to be too; Velero snapshots cluster and namespace state on a schedule and restores it into a fresh cluster for disaster recovery, staying in the code-defined, open-source workflow the rest of the pipeline already lives in.
- 10
Compliance & Awareness
VantaVanta$$Automates SOC 2 evidence collection by connecting to the cloud infrastructure this team already runs, which matters for closing enterprise deals without pulling engineers off product work to assemble an audit by hand.