GitLab Survey Surfaces Major DevSecOps Challenges Ahead

A report based on a survey of 4,071 software professionals published this week by GitLab, a provider of a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform, found that while appreciation of the potential value of DevSecOps best practices is high, the ability to implement those practices is uneven at best.

According to the survey, half of the respondents reported that security vulnerabilities are discovered mostly by the security team rather than developers after code is merged and in a test environment. And, when cybersecurity professionals participate in a DevSecOps process, the survey found those organizations are three times more likely to discover bugs before code is merged. In addition, a full 90% of those organizations are more likely to have tested between 91% and 100% of their code early in the development process.

Obviously, that’s better than discovering them after they’ve been deployed in a production environment. On the downside, however, nearly half of security professionals participating in the GitLab survey (49%) said they struggle to get developers to make remediation of vulnerabilities a priority. That challenge may reflect the overall maturity of the DevSecOps practices in place. For example, only 25% of developers participating in the survey rated their security practices as being good. That compares to only 20% of security professionals who rated their processes as good. Only 14% of respondents said they are relying on application security tools to test more than 91% of their code. A full 44% are using these types of tools to test less than a third of their code.

Priyanka Sharma, director of technology evangelism for GitLab, said the survey makes it clear that DevSecOps is now officially a thing in the enterprise. However, only 44% of the survey respondents said that security vulnerabilities are a performance metric for developers in their organizations. As such, it’s clear there is still a long way to go before anything approaching DevSecOps nirvana is likely to be achieved. In fact, Sharma noted building and deploying more secure applications may require organizations to slow down the rate at which applications are being built, at least initially.

The GitLab survey makes it clear most organizations are still struggling with mastering DevOps. Only 28% of developers said they feel good about their organization’s level of DevOps sophistication, while less than half (45%) said they have been able to implement continuous code deployment at least somewhere in their organization. That level of adoption suggests there still is plenty of opportunity to refine DevOps processes that are not fully ingrained. In fact, it appears most organizations are still trying to master agile development methodologies—more than half of the respondents said they employ Scrum (54%) as their application development methodology, followed by Kanban at 37% and DevOps at 36%.

Ultimately, most organizations will have no choice when it comes to embracing DevSecOps. There simply are not enough cybersecurity professionals available to secure every application on their own. That means developers will need to assume more responsibility for cybersecurity, regardless of whether they like it. DevSecOps processes will be required to validate whether developers have implemented all the security patches and controls required. Anything less than that going forward will be deemed as nothing short of reckless—which, as any lawyer will gladly share, means much higher penalties for everyone involved.

— Mike Vizard