Cisco AppDynamics Survey Surfaces DevSecOps Challenges

A survey of 1,150 large enterprise IT professionals from the AppDynamics unit of Cisco suggested application security progress is being made slowly and steadily as organizations continue to embrace DevSecOps best practices.

The survey finds that while more than three-quarters of respondents (76%) believe that DevSecOps is essential for organizations to effectively protect against a multi-staged security attack on the full application stack only 43% reported their organization has already started to implement DevSecOps workflows while another 46% said they are currently considering making the shift.

More than three-quarters of respondents (78%) also said a lack of a shared vision between application development and security teams presents a challenge to application security over the next 12 months. More than half (55%) said they currently considered security to be more of an inhibitor of innovation than an enabler. Nevertheless, 81% admitted a lack of application security skills and resources is now an issue for their organization, with 79% acknowledging that securing the full application stack is now a priority for their organization.

A full 92% admitted that the rush to rapidly innovate and respond to the changing needs of customers and users during the COVID-19 pandemic has come at the expense of robust application security. Well over half of respondents (58%) also noted their organization often ended up in ‘security limbo’ because they didn’t know what security issues to focus on and prioritize. A total of 88% acknowledged their organization could be doing more to secure the full stack of modern applications across the entire application life cycle.

Not surprisingly, 93% said it’s important to be able to contextualize security so that they can correlate risk in relation to, for example, application performance, end user experience and business metrics. However, more than two-thirds (68%) reported that their current security solutions work well in silos but not together. A total of 85% stated that cultural changes to support the shift to a DevSecOps approach are important to improve application security.

AppDynamics Executive CTO Gregg Ostrowski said it is apparent organizations are still wrestling with not just application security technologies but also people and process issues. The most critical issue is to knock down the silos that exist in organizations that often result in one team demonizing another, he added.

Overall, application security is becoming more challenging as the attack surface expands. A full 89% of technologists reported that their organization experienced an expansion in its attack surfaces over the last two years, with almost half (46%) noting that this expansion is already increasing cybersecurity challenges. One of the primary drives of that expansion as been the rise of the internet-of-things (IoT) applications (59%), rapid adoption of cloud computing platforms (56%) and digital business transformation initiatives (51%).

On the plus side, more than three-quarters of respondents (76%) said they believe artificial intelligence (AI) will play an increasingly important role in addressing application security challenges. The issue, of course, is how soon those advances might be made at a time when attacks against software supply chains are clearly on the rise.