Most firms say DevSecOps needs to up its game to be effective

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Siloed teams, the growing complexity of hybrid and multi-cloud environments, as well as the persistent reliance on manual processes all make vulnerabilities easier to slip into production environments, and harder to spot and address.

Without improved effectiveness in DevSecOps, vulnerability exploits will continue rising both in numbers and destructive power.

This is according to a new report from Dynatrace, which surveyed 1,300 chief information security officers (CISOs) in large organizations around the world, finding 75% agree the prevalence of team silos and point solutions throughout the DevSecOps lifecycle makes it easier for vulnerabilities to slip into production.

DevSecOps risk

Furthermore, Dynatrace found four in five (81%) of CISOs say they expect to see more vulnerability exploits if they can’t make DevSecOps work more effectively - despite just 12% of organizations saying they have a “mature” DevSecOps culture.

While Dynatrace does not detail what “mature” DevSecOps culture entails, it did say that 86% of CISOS see AI and automation as “critical” to the success.

In fact, 77% of CISOs say it’s a “significant challenge” to prioritize vulnerabilities because they lack information about the risk these vulnerabilities pose to their environment, and 58% of the vulnerability alerts that security scanners alone flag as “critical” are not important in production. Individual DevSecOps team member spends more than a quarter (28%) of their time on vulnerability management tasks that could be automated. With automation, each member could free up to 11 hours of their time - each week.

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Also, three-quarters (76%) of CISOs believe the time between discovering a zero-day attack and being able to patch every endpoint presents a “significant challenge”.

According to Bernd Greifeneder, Chief Technology Officer at Dynatrace, businesses should use solutions that “converge observability and security data and are powered by trusted AI and intelligent automation”.

DevSecOps is short for Development, Security, and Operations, and generally refers to a business approach in which product security is not an afterthought or something that’s addressed at the end of a product’s development cycle, but rather something that’s baked in throughout the entire IT lifecycle and is a shared responsibility of multiple teams.

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Sead is a seasoned freelance journalist based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. He writes about IT (cloud, IoT, 5G, VPN) and cybersecurity (ransomware, data breaches, laws and regulations). In his career, spanning more than a decade, he’s written for numerous media outlets, including Al Jazeera Balkans. He’s also held several modules on content writing for Represent Communications.