Three in four IT leaders say COVID-19 is accelerating initiatives to secure software development process

New survey sponsored by Micro Focus underpins the importance of continuous security and automated testing throughout the software development cycle

SINGAPORE, Nov. 18, 2020 — Micro Focus (LSE: MCRO; NYSE: MFGP) today released DevSecOps: A framework for digital innovation, an IDC InfoBrief featuring findings from the IDC Asia Pacific 2020 DevSecOps Survey. The survey reveals that the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak has driven the demand for secure software development initiatives, according to 74 percent of the respondents in Asia Pacific (APAC). The rise of DevSecOps comes at a time when IT leaders are faced with an increasingly active cyberthreat landscape, coupled with higher consumer expectations of digital offerings and application usage due to a sharp increase in online activities. However, a majority of APAC organizations are not equipped to tackle the issue at hand, with 55 percent of the respondents ranking modest to low in terms of their DevSecOps maturity levels.    

Surveying close to 1,200 enterprise leaders across 14 APAC regions, the study looked at the state of organizational DevSecOps maturity, as well as DevSecOps activities, plans, challenges and processes. DevSecOps refers to a set of practices that add security to the software development supply chain from the planning stage to deployment, delivery, and beyond. IDC's survey found that while there is awareness of the benefits of engaging in DevSecOps practices amongst IT leaders, many obstacles remain on the path to the full adoption. 

Today’s businesses recognize that efficient software development, security threats, and business agility as the top drivers of DevSecOps initiatives in APAC. But on a regional scale, only four in ten APAC leaders say they have united their DevOps and security teams to improve software development, with India (53 percent) and China (51 percent) leading integration efforts. DevSecOps adoption is still in the early stages for Korea (29 percent) and Japan (30 percent).

“Moving new digital initiatives forward quickly, especially to optimize the online experience for consumers and employees who are increasingly interacting with organizations virtually today, calls for secure and efficient software development processes,” said Stephen McNulty, President of Micro Focus Asia Pacific and Japan. “This is a defining period for relationship and digital trust building, which means organizations will need to quickly speed up DevSecOps adoption through continuous and automated security testing to effectively respond to their stakeholders’ digital needs.”

Today, an organization’s DevSecOps maturity level is intricately linked to its people, processes and tools—looking at stakeholder buy-in, approach to secure DevOps, and the technology used in testing and automating processes. Findings from the study reveal that the top obstacles to DevSecOps adoption are spread across the following three pillars: budget issues (15 percent), dearth of talent or skills (13 percent), and difficulty automating across hybrid infrastructures (13 percent).

Overcoming these obstacles is a priority for APAC organizations as the need for software-powered innovation rises, which translates to a greater scrutiny on application digital risks. The notion of late-stage security testing in software development is proving to be outdated in the context of today’s digital economy, where secure applications, services and platforms are the cornerstone of digital innovation.

Amongst APAC organization, DevOps teams are still primarily responsible for application security testing, followed by Security teams. The most common security tools currently in use are software composition analysis (24 percent), followed by interactive application security testing (19 percent), and static application security testing (18 percent).

“The most holistic approach to DevSecOps that will play a key role in increasing organizations’ maturity level involves making security an integral part of every software development project, striving for 100 percent automated testing, and continuously analyzing application performance for potential gaps,” said Stephen McNulty.

Micro Focus Fortify helps organizations jumpstart and accelerate DevSecOps adoption by integrating and automating with existing tools, frameworks and technologies within the CI/CD processes. Fortify continues its drive towards more support of modern applications with container scanning, additional language support, API scanning, and deeper CI/CD integration, allowing DevSecOps teams to further automate and scale to build secure software fast. 

“The pressure to fully embed security into the continuous delivery pipeline signals a major shift towards a stronger DevSecOps culture, characterized by the abandonment of siloed functional teams in favor of shared responsibilities between developers and security experts. This is a strong step in the right direction for organizations looking to adopt an end-to-end security approach and build better digital capabilities,”  said Gina Smith, IDC Asia/Pacific's DevOps Research lead.     

More Information

The full IDC InfoBrief, DevSecOps: A framework for digital innovation, is available today. 

Methodology

IDC surveyed 1,178 enterprise leaders in 14 Asia/Pacific regions—India, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Japan and Korea—about their DevSecOps activities, plans, challenges, and processes.

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About Micro Focus

Micro Focus delivers enterprise software to empower our 40,000 customers worldwide to digitally transform. With a broad portfolio, underpinned by a robust analytics ecosystem, the company enables customers to address the four core pillars of digital transformation: Enterprise DevOps, Hybrid IT Management, Predictive Analytics and Security, Risk & Governance.  By design, these tools bridge the gap between existing and emerging technologies so customers can run and transform at the same time.

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