Progress survey reveals roadblocks to DevSecOps success in Australia

Progress survey reveals roadblocks to DevSecOps success in Australia

The survey found that 60% of Australian respondents across 500+-employee organizations admit that they don’t fully understand how security fits into DevSecOps.

Progress, a trusted provider of application development and infrastructure software, has announced the results of its 2022 survey, DevSecOps: Simplifying Complexity in a Changing World.

More than 600 IT, security, application development and DevOps decision makers, working for 500+-employee organizations globally, including in Australia, shared insights into the level of DevSecOps maturity and challenges faced across their organizations.

Conducted by Insight Avenue, the DevSecOps survey aimed to uncover the true state of DevOps and DevSecOps adoption – from business priorities to technology adoption, lack of cultural alignment and investment and the common pitfalls and successes shared by businesses worldwide.

Significant findings from the survey include:

  • Many Australian companies are behind in achieving their DevOps and DevSecOps goals. 88% acknowledge they need to be more strategic about how they manage DevSecOps and 14% still consider themselves at an exploratory and proof-of-concept stage.
  • Security is the number one driver behind most DevOps and DevSecOps implementations. Yet only 32% feel confident in the level of collaboration between security and development – 68% are either not particularly confident or not confident at all.
  • 84% experience challenges in their current approaches to security and 60% admit that they don’t fully understand how security fits into DevSecOps. In addition, 62% said they were not particularly confident or not confident at all in the accuracy of their security and compliance data.
    • Encouragingly, 48% were familiar and interested in Infrastructure and Policy-As-Code
  • 58% of respondents agreed that culture is the biggest barrier to DevSecOps progress, yet only 24% are prioritizing culture as an area to optimize in the next 12-18 months.
  • In addition, at a people level, respondents said that they felt the following should happen to support a shift to a more strategic DevOps approach compared to a tactical approach involving only Dev/IT Ops:
    • Upskilling of developers and engineers to move into SRE roles (72%)
    • Creation and hiring of new roles such as certified SRE (Site Reliability Engineer) (60%)
    • More investment in continuous learning for developers and engineers (48%)

The organizations succeeding in the implementation of DevOps and DevSecOps policies and practices recognize the importance of security training and upskilling. This helps them reach a higher level of continued long-term collaboration between security and development teams.

According to the respondents, the top business factors driving the adoption and evolution of DevOps inside their organizations include a focus on agility, reducing the business risk of quality, security, and downtime or performance issues, and the need to implement DevOps to support a cloud-mandate or their move to the cloud. Other survey areas highlighted include infrastructure  modernization efforts, policy as code, cloud-native adoption, time to ROI, investment and education opportunities and more. 

“The benefits of integrating security into DevOps are plentiful – from reduced risk and lower costs to faster delivery and more effective compliance. Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as snapping your fingers,” said Sundar Subramanian, EVP & GM DevOps, Progress. “Our research confirms what we see and hear from customers every day – that each has their own unique culture and trajectory, with their own inflection points and challenges, which present more than one roadblock to DevSecOps adoption. That’s why businesses around the globe are turning to Progress. We make DevSecOps an automated reality.”

The race to digital has only accelerated across every aspect of business over the last few years, and organizations that have embraced this acceleration are thriving today. They rely on Progress to serve the entire DevSecOps lifecycle, from design to development to operational assurance – including secure hybrid cloud infrastructure management, full-stack observability and high availability. Progress is a leader in DevOps and DevSecOps, offering the essential products to automate and secure deployments to multi-cloud, hybrid cloud and on-premise environments.

The survey, DevSecOps: Simplifying Complexity in a Changing World, was conducted by Insight Avenue, a UK-based research firm, specializing in business-to-business technology research. The team conducted 606 interviews with IT/Security/App Dev and DevOps decision makers in organizations with 500+ employees from 11 countries from Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America and the United States.

The full report and findings can be found here.

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