Mastering DevSecOps at Scale with Smithy
Introduction: Leading DevSecOps in most companies is more of a pain than it should be given modern automation. You’re responsible for an environment with dozens or even hundreds of repositories, each showcasing a myriad of technologies deployed across cloud and on-premises infrastructure. The challenge? Identifying vulnerabilities and addressing them across this chaotic landscape without losing your sanity or sacrificing impact. While you focus on “more vulnerabilities”, your internal customers (the development team) care about results accuracy and low noise.
The Challenges of Modern DevSecOps: In such a dynamic environment, common issues arise that make DevSecOps a more complicated than it should be:
- Toolchain Limitations: A single tool rarely covers all the varied technologies and codebases effectively.
- Context Complexity: Differentiating between real threats and false positives demands extensive context, pulling from both code and cloud infrastructure. How do you know that a CVSS 10 needs addressing if you don’t know what the vulnerable code is used for.
- Stakeholder Communication: Every finding report must be communicated to a group of different stakeholders, e.g. managers, developers, PMs, auditors, and more. From our observations, their needs typically are:
- Managers, clear metrics and insights, not raw vague alerts. Since they must present these findings up the chain they need a format that’s easy to digest.
- Developers Developers are usually busy and need minimal, precise information. That should be in GitHub or whatever dashboard they already use. If possible, findings should integrate with existing linting tools.
- PMs are encouraged to prioritize features over vulnerabilities. To get their buy-in, information must tie directly to cost, effort, and current priorities.
- Auditors require proof of fixed vulnerabilities and policy adherence. When they have time-consuming compliance exercises they need easy to digest screenshots and aggregate information.
- Training Reluctance: Developer training is usually deprioritized, leading to last-minute rushes that stress everyone involved. How often have you been in a position where teams need to take last minute PCI training?
- Manual Effort: Babysitting the entire process—triaging vulnerabilities, chasing fixes, and managing compliance—leads to burnout.
Enter Smithy: Your DevSecOps No-Code Co-Pilot Smithy isn’t just another tool in your tech stack; it’s your operational backbone for orchestrating security workflows. Here’s how it can transform your DevSecOps practice:
Step 1: Analyzing dependencies, infrastructure and code, finding first and third party risk Start with composition and static analysis for code and IAC:
Step 2: Contextualizing and Presenting Results Developers get overwhelmed by the noisy output from standard analysis tools. Smithy addresses this with a reachability analysis enricher:
With reachability analysis, only vulnerabilities that are reachable from the command line or the web are flagged, reducing noise and focusing developer efforts. Results? A notable reduction in findings.
Add a historical deduplication utility to further filter out repetitive alerts:
This step further cuts noise , providing cleaner, actionable results.
Last, let’s reduce the SAST false positives by running multiple engines and only reporting the common findings for stronger signal.
Step 3: Multi-Channel Reporting Smithy’s integration capabilities allow you to deliver tailored reports to every stakeholder:
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Developers: Directly in GitHub.
Output in GitHub ensures developers receive minimal, necessary alerts seamlessly within their workflow.
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Project Managers (PMs): Automatically generate Jira tickets that fit within their task management system.
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CISOs and Management: Access clear dashboards via Kibana for an executive overview of current vulnerabilities, metrics, and remediation status.
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Team Alerts: Stay updated with Slack notifications so teams know what requires attention immediately.
Conclusion: Smithy’s orchestration transforms DevSecOps by automating the tedious parts, reducing noise, and presenting results in a targeted way. While it won’t change your work hours, it will maximize your impact—helping you delegate analysis, streamline stakeholder communication, and regain control over a sprawling code environment.
Ready to shift from manual chaos to automated clarity? Gear up with Smithy and start your DevSecOps evolution.