New DevOps Research From Sonatype Reveals Changing Attitudes Toward Application Security in Telecommunications Sector

Top performing software development teams embrace DevSecOps automation

Fulton, MD – April 25, 2017 – Sonatype, the leader in software supply chain automation, today announced the telecommunications results of its 2017 DevSecOps Community Survey. 160 telecommunications IT professionals participated in the online survey conducted in February 2017, out of a total of 2,292 overall survey respondents. The survey revealed that mature development organizations ensure automated security is woven into their DevOps practice early, everywhere, and at scale. Analysis of responses also found that 20% of telecom organizations continue to struggle with breaches, consistent with overall survey respondents.

The adoption of DevOps in the telecom industry is evidenced by 57% of survey respondents describing their practices as very mature or improving in maturity, compared to 67% of all survey respondents. In addition, 46% of telecommunications development and operations teams see security teams and policies slowing them down.

Other key findings from the survey include:

Development plays an active, early role in application security though telecom lags behind other industries

• Only 18% of telecom developers are taking more responsibility for security saying it’s a top concern. In mature telecom DevOps organizations, this number rises to 24%. Of all the industries analyzed, the telecom figures are the lowest. In comparison, 24% of all survey respondents and 38% of all mature DevOps respondents say security is a top concern.

For DevOps teams, security controls are increasingly automated throughout the development lifecycle

• 58% of telecom respondents have an open source governance policy in place; this number increases to 64% in mature telecom DevOps organizations.
• 29% of telecom respondents said that they automate application security analysis at all stages of the software development life cycle (SDLC).

Automated security practices allow developers to keep pace with the speed and scale of innovation

• 91% of telecom survey respondents indicated that security was a top concern when deploying containers, yet only 56% leverage security solutions to address this problem. Of all industries analyzed, the telecom sector was the least likely to use automated container security solutions.
• 40% of telecom organizations keep a complete software bill of materials to help them track down new open source vulnerabilities faster (e.g., Commons-Collection, Struts2). This is compared to 35% of overall survey respondents.
  

"As evidenced by this year’s survey results, organizations everywhere are now transforming their development from waterfall-native to DevOps-native tools and processes,” said Wayne Jackson, CEO, Sonatype. “Along the way, they are coming to grips with one simple fact: DevOps is not an excuse to do application security poorly; rather it is an opportunity to do application security better than ever.”

About the Survey
The 2017 DevSecOps Community Survey provides visibility into the attitudes of software professionals toward DevOps best practices and the changing role of application security. 160 respondents from the telecommunications sector completed the survey. The survey was conducted by Sonatype, Contino, DZone, Emerasoft, Ranger4, and Signal Sciences. The survey’s margin of error is ±2.02 percentage points for 2,292 IT professionals at the 95% confidence level.