Enterprises today are in a relentless race to digitize or die. If they don’t digitize business processes, services or internal workflows and their competitors do, they will be at a steep disadvantage—and perhaps soon an irrecoverable one.
In more and more companies these efforts are being driven by DevOps. According to IDC, the vast majority of businesses today think—and rightly so—that it is essential for them to put into place the right resources and IT processes to support a digital business model. Unfortunately, about 75 percent of organizations don’t think that their IT organization is actually scalable enough to deliver and support a comprehensive digital business model.
There are many reasons why so many organizations have a challenging time with their digital transformation efforts. Many of these are cultural: IT commands tightfisted control over all information technologies used throughout the organization, yet being unable to deliver the infrastructure and digital services enterprises need to succeed, for example. Or, others within the organization still are unable to see how rapidly the world is being changed by digital technologies and so aren’t taking the necessary steps.
Another reason is security. That’s because this rapid digitization of business processes can have a profound impact on how enterprises secure their data, applications and software development and delivery. In DevOps.com’s inaugural annual “Security @ the Speed of DevOps” survey, we queried 255 security IT decision makers within organizations currently practicing DevOps or that are on a path to DevOps adoption. The survey found that enterprises of all sizes are embracing DevOps, cloud, continuous integration and deployment. But in securing these processes, however, we found vast differences in maturity.
When it comes to DevOps practices, larger companies are outperforming. For organizations with 5,000 to 9,999 employees, a full 90 percent have either adopted or started DevOps practices. However, only 38 percent of organizations with 500 or fewer employees have started DevOps or widely adopted such practices.
As I wrote in our report on the survey, smaller organizations also have a way to go with automated security testing. Only 6.5 percent of those with fewer than 100 employees have automated large parts of their application security testing, while 29 percent have automated some of their application security testing. For firms with 5,000 to 10,000 employees, 38 percent have automated large parts of their testing, and nearly 50 percent some of their testing. For those with more than 10,000 employees, these figures are 20 percent and 48 percent, respectively.
The challenge here, for many organizations, is the same with enterprise security in general: the view that security slows things down. For the business, it’s about getting more digital capabilities out as quickly as is possible. It’s the same for developers. Security too often is seen as standing in the way of this.
When this conflict is experienced at DevOps speed, there is the risk not only of development slowing down but also security processes breaking. To succeed, enterprises can’t take the same approaches to security as they did in the past. They must find tools and processes that are designed for the highly automated and continuous world of DevOps.
Have a look at our survey and report to see how enterprises are tackling this challenge today.
