Core platform systems support business-critical applications, and are expected to be available and highly responsive 24/7/365. As an example, many industry verticals with legacy infrastructure are adopting Hybrid or native cloud to stay competitive, balance scalability, drive cost-efficiency, and achieve regulatory compliance. However, this shift introduces significant challenges related to system performance, security, and compliance. These challenges must be addressed with strategic mitigation measures.

In designing and developing critical platforms software, supply chain security becomes extremely important as supply chain attacks succeed not because of a single vulnerability; they succeed by exploiting weak links across code, pipelines, artifacts, and trust boundaries. In many organizations, the CI/CD pipeline itself has become the weakest link; secured late, governed reactively, and treated as infrastructure rather than part of the product.

This session presents a shift-left DevSecOps strategy to eliminate weak links by design throughout the software delivery lifecycle. Drawing on real-world experience building and operating critical and large-scale, regulated platforms, the talk reframes CI/CD, build systems, and artifact repositories as first-class security surfaces rather than just delivery tooling.

Attendees will also learn architectural and operational patterns that remove entire classes of supply chain risk. The result is a DevSecOps approach that strengthens trust, improves resilience, and preserves developer velocity by eliminating the weakest link before software ships.