Industry Insights

Why Every Enterprise Needs a DevSecOps Control Plane

Written by: Shawn Ahmed

7 min read

Every enterprise depends on software delivery to stay competitive, yet few have a strategy that gives them true control or intelligence across the entire lifecycle.

In complex enterprise environments, software delivery rarely runs cleanly or consistently. One division runs Jenkins. Another has moved to GitHub Actions. An acquired business brings in GitLab or Bitbucket. Security runs scans and shares results as PDFs. Release managers track go-lives in spreadsheets and Slack threads.

The result is a mess of dashboards and multiple incompatible systems that weren't designed to talk to each other. This isn’t just a technology challenge; it’s a business risk. Fragmented delivery pipelines slow innovation, increase audit exposure, and erode trust with customers and regulators.

From an engineering leadership view, that means blind spots. Each team might be efficient on its own, but the enterprise loses visibility, governance, and shared understanding. Trying to standardize on a single platform almost never works. Mergers, cloud migrations, and regional differences guarantee diversity. And let’s be frank, the tech stacks you’ve chosen, there were and remain good reasons behind those choices.

This leaves most leaders with two bad options. Rip and replace everything, which is disruptive and expensive. Or live with the chaos and hope it holds. Neither is sustainable. Every CIO knows this feeling: what should be an innovation engine turns into an operational burden.

AI is amplifying aspects of this challenge.

As AI accelerates more code, it also accelerates risk downstream from the code generation. Generative code tools and automated testing promise faster delivery, but when dropped into fragmented environments, they just create exponential exposure to risk. AI-generated code flows into pipelines with inconsistent build and deployment standards. Scans get duplicated or worse, altogether omitted. Evidence is spread across the entire landscape and is hard to track down. Without the right governance in place, AI can create exposure faster than it creates value. What should accelerate delivery instead adds complexity and rework.

What’s missing isn’t another platform. It’s a DevSecOps control and context plane.

Companies have spent years modernizing their delivery stack with best-of-breed tools chosen for each team and purpose. Those investments work, but they were never built to operate as one system.

CloudBees Unify changes that dynamic.

It sits above your delivery tools to unify security and delivery telemetry into a single, normalized data model. This provides governance and delivery awareness without touching the underlying pipelines and creates a coordinated system of record that brings your existing investments into alignment without forcing standardization or migration.

Controlling the chaos and unlocking the full value of software delivery

The control plane does two things every enterprise company needs: it controls the chaos created by tool sprawl, and it unlocks the full value of your delivery stack.

Here’s how it delivers on both.

  • First, it brings order and simplifies change
    Unify data and policies across tools to create a single view of delivery health and risk. Leaders see what’s being built, deployed, and where issues sit. Teams keep their workflows while gaining consistent standards and shared context across the enterprise.

    Whether you are adding new tools or replacing existing ones, the control plane adapts easily. It orchestrates pipelines, approvals, and compliance automatically, becoming the foundation for modernization that happens gradually, not through disruptive migrations.

  • Second, it makes security continuous, not cumbersome
    Security shouldn’t live separately inside every pipeline, where it slows teams down and forces developers to manage scans by hand. It should operate as a shared service, centrally governed, continuously enforced, and invisible to developers, so teams deliver safer software with less friction.

    The control plane gives security and governance teams the power to define best-in-class policies once and apply them everywhere. It orchestrates enforcement across all workflows, collects evidence in real time, and creates a verifiable system of record for every delivery decision. CISOs gain continuous visibility and assurance that every release meets policy without slowing delivery. The result is governance that’s consistent, continuous, and invisible to developers, so security strengthens while delivery accelerates.

  • Third, makes AI contextual and trustworthy
    The first wave of AI-accelerated code generation required human-provided context to be effective. The next wave, sometimes referred to as Agentic AI, is transforming how software is tested, secured, and released by introducing autonomous systems that operate inside delivery pipelines, reasoning over build, test, and deployment data with full lifecycle awareness. These agentic systems assist teams with real delivery decisions, not just code suggestions.

    Because these agents produce non-deterministic outcomes, they need clear constraints such as policies, governance rules, and system-level understanding drawn from the trusted delivery data already unified in CloudBees. By connecting this telemetry across the SDLC, the control plane naturally evolves into a tailored context plane for AI, giving agents the guardrails and intelligence they need to act safely.

    Humans remain in the loop, and every AI action is informed, governed, and auditable, resulting in faster, safer automation that teams can trust. This is AI that amplifies engineering judgment rather than replacing it.

Enterprises like Adobe, Capital One, Salesforce, and IHG are already using CloudBees to standardize governance, automate approvals, and embed compliance directly into their delivery workflows. Forrester analyzed the impact of this approach in a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study. The data was clear and the results compelling:

  • 70% reduction in release preparation time in the first year

  • 95% reduction by year three

  • 99% reduction in outages

  • 60% increase in deployment volume without adding headcount

  • 27.5 million dollars in value over three years

That value came not only from faster releases but from fewer compliance incidents, reduced downtime, and accelerated time-to-revenue.

With CloudBees Unify, we are now extending that proven approach beyond CloudBees CI and CDRO to support multiple CI engines and the broader AI-powered software delivery toolchain.

Why this Shift is Urgent

The stakes for software delivery have never been higher. Every company is a software company, but few are confident in how they can continue to deliver, secure, and govern it. The pressure to move fast has collided with the need to stay compliant, resilient, and ready for AI.

That tension is now breaking at three points:

  • First, the attack surface is expanding.
    Software supply chain attacks are rising, and fragmented pipelines make them harder to detect. Continuous security and control are no longer optional.

  • Second, regulation is accelerating.
    Auditors and regulators now expect real-time evidence, not annual reports. The cost of non-compliance is growing, but so is the opportunity for automation.

  • Third, AI is moving faster than most organizations can manage.
    Without a unifying layer of governance and tailored context, AI creates risk faster than it creates value. A control plane provides the foundation to use it safely and intelligently.

If your delivery still depends on tribal knowledge, manual handoffs, or Slack threads, you are not in control; you are running on luck.

A DevSecOps control and context plane replaces luck with confidence. It connects your delivery ecosystem through a single layer of governance and delivery intelligence, without changing how existing tools run.

The result is consistent standards, real-time visibility, and frictionless security across your entire toolchain. It is the foundation for Agentic AI, providing the trusted data and safeguards that make intelligent automation safe and effective.

You do not need to wait for a migration to see the difference. You can start with what you already have, connect one pipeline to CloudBees Unify, and see results the same day.

The future of DevSecOps is not about more tools; it is about more control, deeper systemic awareness, and the confidence to let AI accelerate what humans do best: innovate.

Shawn Ahmed
Chief Product Officer & CTO, CloudBees

See how unified control and context can work for your stack; See CloudBees Unify in action.

Help shape the next chapter of contextual, human-centered AI; Join the CloudBees AI Design Partner Program.

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