DEVOPSdigest

Start with DevSecOps: Eat Carrots, Not Cupcakes

Mature development organizations ensure automated security is woven into their DevOps practice, early, everywhere, and at scale, according to Sonatype's 2017 DevSecOps Community Survey.

Analysis of responses also found that IT organizations continue to struggle with breaches, as nearly a 50% increase was recorded between Sonatype’s 2014 and 2017 survey.

The adoption of DevOps around the world is evidenced by 67% of survey respondents describing their practices as very mature or of improving maturity. Where traditional development and operations teams (47%) see security teams and policies slowing them down, DevOps teams have discovered new ways to integrate security at the speed of development. Only 28% of mature DevOps teams believe they are being slowed by security requirements.

Other key findings from the survey include:

■ Developers are taking more responsibility for security with 24% of all respondents saying it’s a top concern while in mature DevOps organizations that number rises to 38%.

■ 58% of mature DevOps teams have automated security as part of Continuous Integration (CI) practices compared to 39% of all survey participants.

■ For DevOps teams, security controls are increasingly automated throughout the development lifecycle. 42% of mature DevOps organizations perform application security analysis at every stage of the software delivery lifecycle (SDLC). This number shrinks to just 27% when all survey respondents are counted.

■ 88% of survey respondents indicated that security was a top concern when deploying containers, yet only 53% leverage security solutions to address this problem.

■ 35% of organizations keep a complete software bill of materials to help them track down new open source vulnerabilities faster (e.g., Commons-Collection, Struts2).

■ 85% of those surveyed from highly mature DevOps practices received some form of application security training, ensuring awareness of secure coding practices. In immature DevOps practices, 30% received no training.

"As evidenced by this year’s survey results, organizations everywhere are now transforming their development from waterfall-native to DevOps-native tools and processes,” said Wayne Jackson, CEO, Sonatype. “Along the way, they are coming to grips with one simple fact: DevOps is not an excuse to do application security poorly; rather it is an opportunity to do application security better than ever.”

Methodology: The 2017 DevSecOps Community Survey provides visibility into the attitudes of software professionals toward DevOps best practices and the changing role of application security. The survey was conducted by Sonatype, Contino, DZone, Emerasoft, Ranger4, and Signal Sciences. The survey’s margin of error is ±2.02 percentage points for 2,292 IT professionals at the 95% confidence level.

Derek Weeks is VP and DevOps Advocate at Sonatype.