DEVOPSdigest

Companies expect increased reliance on Cloud Native Applications (CNAs), however security concerns could prove to be a major obstacle, according to The State of Cloud Native Security, commissioned by Capsule8, Duo Security, and Signal Sciences.

62 percent of companies ... rely on cloud native for more than half of their new applications

As organizations seek to modernize infrastructure, CNAs provide huge opportunities to increase reach, scale and efficiency. Cloud native adoption is significantly on the rise, with 62 percent of companies noting that they rely on cloud native for more than half of their new applications. That figure is expected to grow to more than 80 percent over the next three years. However, businesses are keenly aware of the potential security risks that come along with it and more than half of those surveyed (56 percent) believe cloud native increases risk.

Fueling the concern over cyberattacks is their explosive growth, which shows no signs of slowing. According to the survey, 80 percent of respondents note attacks have increased at a rate of 2x or more over the last year. This is of particular concern when it comes to modern infrastructure, as production environments are not adequately protected for the amount of critical information they hold. Attacks on production environments levy significant consequences, with nearly half of those surveyed (48 percent) noting an attack has delivered damage to the system itself. Furthermore, 44 percent of those surveyed said an attack on production infrastructure has resulted in the loss of customer data.

Some additional key findings include:

■ As attacks increase, so does the rate of security alerts; only about one-third of the organizations surveyed are able to respond to more than 75 percent of alerts

■ Organizations have limited real-time visibility into attacks; 73 percent say they lack actionable, fine-grain, real-time insight into threats and ongoing attacks

■ False positives continue to plague IT and security organizations; 46 percent of those surveyed said that more than half of production environment security alerts were false positives

■ Poor analytics are the number one cause of false positives; nearly half reported this to be the primary issue

■ Organizations struggle to balance security with efficient deployment of production applications; 40 percent of those surveyed do not currently have a DevOps function in place – amongst those, half said the lack of appropriate skills on the security team was the primary obstacle

Overall, the benefits of modernizing production infrastructure, through cloud native deployments, are clear. To take advantage of all that cloud has to offer, businesses must understand their current posture; establish a roadmap for integrating Cybersecurity capabilities into DevOps; and push for the visibility required across this critical business infrastructure.

Methodology: In August 2018, Capsule8, Duo and Signal Sciences surveyed 486 senior-level information technology (IT) and IT security (IT sec) decision makers. The web-based survey was executed by ResearchNow. All respondents were qualified to be senior-level decision makers with roles including CIO, CISO, VP of IT, Director of IT and senior cloud security architect, among others. All respondents are employed by companies with at least $250 million in annual revenue. Half represent companies with revenue between $250-999 million; half come from organizations with greater than $1 billion annual revenue.