Research

Abstract:

As organizations modernize their software development processes leveraging cloud services for faster, more efficient software application delivery, cybersecurity teams are investing in developer-focused security tools to keep up. ESG research shows organizations have experienced a range of security incidents, many caused by preventable coding mistakes. This puts pressure on security teams to incorporate security into development to fix coding issues before the applications are deployed and to enable efficient remediation to prevent security incidents.

Abstract:

As organizations move to cloud-native application development to meet business demands with greater productivity and innovation, security teams need to adapt their application security strategies to support modern development processes. Developers’ increased usage of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) to provision their own cloud infrastructure and the availability of open source software (OSS) enable them to efficiently build, release, and update their software. Security teams need to ensure that they have the right security processes and controls in place to support these key components of cloud-native software and to effectively manage risk as development scales.

Abstract:

Security teams are challenged by the speed of modern software development processes. See data behind the movement to shift security left in an effort to increase security (without slowing down development) with this infographic, Walking the Line: GitOps and Shift Left Security.

Research Objectives

As organizations adopt modern software development processes, developers are empowered to quickly develop and release their applications by deploying them to the cloud. Security teams are challenged keeping up with the growth and speed of continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) cycles and their dynamic components.

While the industry has been talking about shifting security left to help security scale with rapid development, organizations have faced challenges putting that into practice. Most cloud-native security incidents are caused by misconfigurations, putting pressure on security teams to find ways to incorporate security into development so coding issues are caught and fixed before deployment. Organizations also need to focus on better ways to work with developers for rapid remediation of any detected security issues.

In order to gain insights into these trends, ESG surveyed 350 IT (30%) and cybersecurity (40%) decision makers, as well as application developers (30%), responsible for evaluating, purchasing, and utilizing developer-focused security products at midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise (1,000 or more employees) organizations in North America (US and Canada).