Majority of organisations report DevOps delays

 Synopsys has published its “Global State of DevSecOps 2023” report examining the strategies, tools, and practices impacting software security. The new report from the Synopsys Cybersecurity Research Center is based on a survey conducted by Censuswide polling more than 1,000 IT professionals across the world – including developers, application security professionals, DevOps engineers and CISOs, as well as experts in technology, cybersecurity, and software development.

Over 80% of survey respondents indicated that a critical security issue in deployed software impacted their DevOps delivery schedule in the last year. Implementing DevSecOps, a framework focused on embedding security testing throughout each phase of the software development life cycle (SDLC), is an established way to reduce the volume of critical vulnerabilities and exploitable security issues in production applications.

“While a vast majority [91%] of organisations have adopted some level of DevSecOps practices, they continue to face barriers effectively implementing its methods, especially at enterprise scale,” said Jason Schmitt, general manager of the Synopsys Software Integrity Group. “Specifically, we’re noticing that organisations across the globe are struggling with integrating and prioritising the results from the multiple application security testing tools used by their teams. They also struggle to enforce security and compliance policies automatically through infrastructure-as-code, a practice that was cited most often by respondents as a key factor of their security program’s overall success.”

Key findings from the report include:

-      Most security professionals are already using AI –and even more are wary of its risks. A majority (52%) of survey respondents noted that they are actively using AI to enhance their organisation’s software security measures. However, even more (76%) are “very or somewhat concerned” about potential errors or issues with AI-based cybersecurity solutions.

-      Remediation timelines for most organisations can span weeks. Twenty-eight percent of respondents said their organisations take as long as three weeks to patch critical security risks/vulnerabilities in deployed applications. Another 20% said it can take up to a month, even as most exploits appear within days.

-      Application security testing tools are seen as useful to at least two-thirds of respondents. When asked to gauge the usefulness of security tools and practices – including dynamic application security testing (DAST), interactive application security testing (IAST), static application security testing (SAST), and software composition analysis (SCA) – each tool included in the survey was regarded as useful by at least two-thirds of respondents. The report identifies SAST as the highest-regarded AST tool, with 72% indicating that they find it useful. That is closely followed by IAST (69%), SCA (68%), and DAST (67%). 

-      Security testing responsibilities are equally shared between internal security and development/engineering teams. Software developers and engineers (45%) are just as likely to be tasked with performing security tests on their organisation’s business-critical applications and continuous improvement (CI) pipelines as internal security team members (46%). One-third (33%) of organisations are also enlisting external consultants to supplement the efforts of internal teams.