TL;DR

A secure pipeline does more than run a vulnerability scanner. Protect the repository and identities first; keep secrets out of code and give workloads short-lived credentials; scan code, dependencies, infrastructure definitions, and container images; pin and verify what you build; require risk-based gates and accountable approvals for production; and preserve evidence that shows who changed what, which checks ran, what was deployed, and how exceptions were handled.

Start with the controls that prevent the most common failures: multifactor authentication, branch protection, secret scanning, least-privilege CI credentials, dependency and image scanning, protected production environments, tested backups, and centralized logs.…