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Tag: survey

  • Survey Sees Surge in Demand for DevOps Skills

    Survey Sees Surge in Demand for DevOps Skills

    The Linux Foundation and edX, a provider of an online learning platform, jointly released an annual report today that for the first time finds organizations are looking for more IT personnel with open source DevOps skills (65%) than developers (59%).

    Clyde Seepersad, senior vice president and general manager for training and certification at The Linux Foundation, said the 2020 Open Source Jobs Report shows that as more workloads shift to the cloud in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of organizations looking to embrace best DevOps practices is increasing substantially. The report finds 70% of respondents are more likely to hire an IT professional with cloud computing skills.

    Based on a survey of 175 hiring managers and 900 IT professionals with open source expertise, the report also finds that despite the economic downturn brought on by the pandemic, 37% of hiring managers say they will be looking to hire more skilled IT professionals in the next six months.

    The report also finds 93% of survey respondents report difficulty finding open source talent. An overwhelming 81% of hiring managers said recruiting open source talent is a priority for 2020, with 56% looking to recruit IT professionals with open source skills in the next six months. Nearly two-thirds (63%) said their organizations have begun to support open source projects with code or other resources for the explicit purpose of recruiting individuals with open source software skills.

    More than half of hiring managers (52%) said they are more likely to hire someone with a certification, while 80% of survey respondents reported providing online training courses for employees to learn open source software. Nearly three-quarters of organizations (74%) are now offering to pay for employee certifications, according to the survey results.

    An equal percentage of hiring managers also identified Linux as the most in-demand skill they seek in new hires, while 63% also said they are looking for IT architects who can build solutions based on open source software.

    Seepersad said given the difficulty attracting talent many organizations are focusing more on training their existing staff rather than trying to recruit talent in an open market where demand for open source expertise remains high.

    The talent pool is more global as more organizations become accustomed to working with staff who are now largely working from home, which, coupled with current economic realities, is limiting how much organizations are willing to pay for IT talent. More organizations are also keen to make sure there is a cultural fit with their organization when hiring, he added.

    In general, it’s clear more IT organizations will need to focus on growing their own farm teams with open source DevOps skills rather than hoping to lure away superstars from other organizations. Rather than simply trying to fill open positions, organizations need to think more in terms of acquiring and managing talent in the same way a general manager manages a sports franchise.

  • Survey Surfaces Lots of Edge Computing Diversity

    Survey Surfaces Lots of Edge Computing Diversity

    A global survey of 1,652 published today by Eclipse Foundation suggests a flood is lifting all platform boats as IT organizations begin to build and deploy a wide range of edge computing applications.

    The survey finds artificial intelligence (30%) is the workload organizations plan to deploy on edge computing platforms, followed closely by control logic (29%), data exchange between multiple nodes (27%) and data aggregation and filtering (27%), also known as sensor filtering.

    The battle among providers of platforms for building and deploying these workloads is heated on all fronts. In terms of operating systems deployed, Linux (43%), FreeRTOS (35%) and Windows (31%) lead the way.

    The most widely employed developer tools are integrated development environments (IDEs) or text editors for the desktop from the Eclipse Foundation (38%) and Visual Studio Code (35%) from Microsoft. Java (20%) is the No. 1 programming language being employed at the edge and in the cloud (24%), followed by Python (17%), while C (20%) followed closely by Java (19%) is the primary language for constrained devices.

    Container images (36%), native binary (33%) and script files (30%) are the top edge computing artifacts, while MySQL/MariaDB (31%), MongoDB (22%) and PostgreSQL (21%) are the top three databases.

    IoT middleware is a tight race between Amazon Web Services (AWS) Internet of Things (35%), Microsoft Azure IoT (31%), and Google Cloud IoT Platform (30%). The top public IoT and cloud platforms are Amazon AWS (AWS), Microsoft Azure (31%) and Google Cloud Platform (26%).

    When it comes to building and deploying these applications, the top concerns are security (39%), connectivity (27%), data collection and analytics (26%), performance (24%) and privacy (23%). Communication security (43%), data encryption at rest (41%) and JSON web tokens (30%) and distributed ledgers (22%) are the most widely employed security technologies.

    In terms of communications, HTTP/HTTPS (51%), MQTT (41%) and TCP/IP (33%) are most widely employed. The dominant connectivity protocols are Wi-Fi (44%) and Ethernet (39%), with cellular and Bluetooth tied for third (37%).

    Cloud-managed over-the-air updates (48%), locally managed over-the-air updates (42%) and network cable (38%) are ranked as the top means for deploying artifacts.

    Mike Milinkovich, executive director for The Eclipse Foundation, said it appears that best DevOps processes are being extended to create an “EdgeOps” discipline around which edge computing applications are built and deployed. A wide variety of open source technologies will play a critical role in advancing EdgeOps—nearly two-thirds of respondents (65%) of respondents either experiment with, use or contribute to open source projects, with the Apache Software Foundation (51%), Eclipse IoT/Eclipse Foundation (49%), Linux Foundation (49%) and IEEE (41%) cited as being the most relevant open source bodies.

    In terms of vertical industry sectors, agriculture (26%) leads, followed by industrial automation, education, automotive and connected/smart cities all tied at 21%.

    There is, of course, multiple definitions when it comes to edge computing. However, as edge computing continues to evolve, the day when there are more workloads deployed at the edge than in the cloud or local data centers may not be all that far off. Chances are also very high that legacy approaches to managing edge computing platforms will also need to be updated to support what, by definition, are highly distributed application environments.

  • Survey Uncovers Issues Even With Advanced IT Teams

    Survey Uncovers Issues Even With Advanced IT Teams

    Even in the best of times, IT teams struggle with myriad issues related to managing their application environments

    A survey of 1,000 C-level executives at software-as-a-service (SaaS) application providers finds that while the bulk of respondents are “highly confident” or “confident” that their cloud applications were running efficiently (91%), many also are still concerned about staying within budget (65%), maximizing resources (62%) and maintaining uptime.

    Results of the survey conducted by Opsani, a provider of tools for optimizing cloud applications based on machine learning algorithms, suggest that even the most advanced IT organizations are finding it challenging to optimize application performance within the constraints of their IT budgets.

    Amir Sharif, vice president of marketing for Opsani, said most SaaS providers have already optimized complex application environments to the greatest extent possible by a team of humans no matter how mature their DevOps processes. The next level of optimization requires artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that can discover, correlate and analyze real-time events and dependencies at levels of scale no human can match, he said.

    Within the most advanced IT teams, all the tasks that can be automated easily have already been completed, added Sharif. As IT environments become more complex, optimizing the IT environment requires platforms capable of instantly implementing policies and procedures defined by the IT team. That shift doesn’t eliminate the need for a DevOps team, but rather a shift in their role to define the policies that need to be automated, he said.

    The Opsani survey finds 43% of respondents update software daily and 37% release new software weekly. Only 15% said they conduct hourly sprints. The top concerns among respondents are employees wasting time on mundane tasks (54%), followed by finding talent (47%) and legacy processes that don’t reflect today’s technology landscape (43%).

    When asked how often their organizations optimized their application stack, 82% said they do so regularly, with 81% reporting their organizations already make use of AI tools for faster decision-making.

    When asked about service level objectives and performance goals, respondents cited transactions per second as their top metric (63%), followed by latency (47%), dollar per transaction (43%). IOPS and throughput tied for fourth (34%).

    Sharif said resistance to AI in general is declining in most IT organizations given the level of complexity faced. A 10-tier microservices application and a backend database developed by Google has more than 75 quintillion configuration permutations that must be adjusted. The average IT team might never attempt to deploy something that complex, but even comparatively simple microservices-based applications can have millions of configuration permutations that can adversely impact performance and security.

    Of course, most C-level executives are likely to think highly of their organization’s IT capabilities. The rank and file, however, make assessments that are a little less rosy. The challenge is, not many IT teams have a lot of insight into how well anyone else is doing. It may be cold comfort to see that even advanced IT teams are struggling with issues.

    However, most teams that are driving revenue-generating applications for an organization will have access to more advanced IT tools a lot sooner than the average enterprise.

  • New Survey Highlights Codebase Size Problems

    New Survey Highlights Codebase Size Problems

    Sourcegraph and Dimensional Research have released a survey of developers at large organizations, which shows a massive growth in codebase size, number of repositories in use and complexity concerns.

    “The Emergence of Big Code – A 2020 Survey of Software Professionals” is definitely intriguing reading, and a few of the results are eye-opening—such as the difference between what development managers think developers are using to search code and what developers say they are actually using. But most of it simply validates what we all knew: Codebases are growing at an alarming rate, through a variety of growth vectors—support for new platforms, use of open source and internal development. Adding environment to code à la GitOps, systems reliability engineering and/or environment automation is adding a layer of completely new source and a layer of complexity not normally in the developer’s realm of immediate concern.

    I’ve been working with Accelerated Strategies Group over the last few months, and we’re looking at tools in this market. The ability to quickly get up to speed on large codebases and the ability to find a specific area in a codebase that is massive and/or spans repositories is a very real need that is not currently well-served. This piques my interest in what Sourcegraph brings to the table, but at the moment we’re focused on the survey, so perhaps in a future blog we’ll talk about Sourcegraph.

    While there is a lot packed into the survey, I think my favorite part is crammed in with other “What would you find useful?” results (the slide is below). Fifty-eight percent of respondents—all of whom are developers—chose, “Finding code by querying semantic relationships, not just matching a string.” As developers, these respondents no doubt are aware of the complexities of this type of feature, particularly in environments with a variety of programming languages and scripts (be they bash, SQL, whatever) all working together. This is huge, and first iterations would be shallow, but is a worthy goal. I’m intrigued to see how well SourceGraph et al solve it.

    Source: The Emergence of Big Code – A 2020 Survey of Software Professionals

    It is also intriguing to see more than half of respondents want the ability to explore ” … both known and unknown code with code intelligence that provides contextual understanding.” That, too, is a tall order. Code analysis has gotten better over time, but contextual analysis of large codebases is notoriously difficult. I’ll be intrigued in the near future to play with this concept and tools that offer it to see how reliable they are and how much human guidance is accepted and/or required to make it a reality.

    Code change velocity reporting and contextual information about code are both available and pretty solid from the majority of full-stack DevOps vendors. Perhaps that is why that particular response only netted 45% and 43% of responses, respectively—the other 50+% are already using them.

    We’re in an interesting time when consolidation appears to be on the upswing and the needs of developers and DevOps teams working in large codebases are becoming more clear and more complex at the same time. Over the next few years the needs reported in this survey will likely be replaced by more specific needs as these are fulfilled and find general use. The question of databases and database integration in large codebase migrations, for example, has these needs, but has other needs closer to the problem domain. As these general issues are resolved, expect your vendors to turn to those more specific, but every bit as complex, problems.

    And just keep rocking it. Find out what the tools and companies already in use at your org have added, and if those capabilities fit with your needs or can enhance your Dev/DevOps exercises. Keep the lights on, keep customers happy and watch for tools to help you make it even better.

  • Financial Services Rise Above in Database DevOps

    Financial Services Rise Above in Database DevOps

    Financial services, pat yourselves on the back. A new study from Redgate shows financial services have superior database DevOps and database monitoring compared to other sectors.

    Financial IT appears to outperform other industries with high-quality database monitoring benchmarks consistently. For example, financial services on average are far quicker to detect and remediate failed deployments.

    Below, we’ll cover the main takeaways from Redgate’s latest 2020 State of Database Monitoring in Financial Services report, and bring in Grant Fritchey, Product Advocate at Redgate, to better understand why the financial sector is performing so positively in database DevOps.

    2020 State of Database Monitoring in Financial Services

    Redgate has released a special financial services edition of its 2020 State of Database Monitoring Report, a study that surveyed 971 database professionals across a wide range of sectors. This financial segment report highlights how database monitoring practices within banking, investment and insurance groups compare to other industries. Here are the main takeaways:

    Frequency and Remediation

    Financial services deploy more frequently and detect and resolve issues more rapidly.

    Financial services are quickly updating their databases. Sixty percent of financial services deploy once a week, whereas 43% of other sectors deploy once a week and some (10%) only update their databases once per year.

    Financial services are quicker to detect issues and respond. For example, 49% of financial institutions detect failed deployments within 10 minutes, compared to 39% across other sectors. The average Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) is less than 10 minutes for 32% of financial services compared to 24% for different sectors.
    [su_note]Want to learn more about DevOps in Financial Services? Join us Thursday, Dec. 3, for FinConDX, a daylong virtual event dedicated to the latest in DevOps, DevSecOps and Digital Transformation practices and tools to help FinServ companies thrive. Register today![/su_note]

    It is impressive that financial services deploy more frequently yet still maintain higher Mean Time to Detection (MTTD) and MTTR than other sectors.

    Growth and Tools

    Financial services have a larger data footprint and a higher demand for database monitoring tools.

    The survey also demonstrates significant growth in overall database footprints, reflecting the sheer accumulation of data year after year. Whereas 26% of other sectors have 50 to 500 database instances, 36% of financial services have this many. Large financial data estates with more than 1,000 instances have grown 8 percentage points year over year.

    To help track these data estates, 66% of financial services use paid database monitoring tools. In other sectors, only 39% use paid database monitoring tools. The report predicts ongoing cloud migration and hybrid cloud modes will push these rates higher.

    Sixty-eight percent of customers report general satisfaction with database monitoring solutions. Yet, financial services cite a lack of features and time-consuming processes as top drawbacks, reflecting a need for financial services to utilize advanced functions and innovate quickly.

    Database Usage

    Financial professionals perform more tasks and grant more non-IT members database access.

    Working with more rigid security benchmarks, database professionals at financial services are often responsible for an increased number of tasks.

    Across all sectors, performance optimization and backups are the most common tasks performed by 70% and 60% of database professionals, respectively. However, if we look at financial services, tasks such as optimization, availability checking, user permissions management, patching and auditing are more common, all 8% to 11% higher.

    The report also found financial service databases, on average, are more widely accessed across the whole business, including database admins, management and business teams. According to the report, this could reflect a higher skill standard across the board at financial organizations.

    Issues

    Human error spikes moderately as financial IT innovates.

    Human error, capacity problems, bad deployments and software failure are top database issues across sectors. However, human error raises slightly within financial services, to 27% from 23%.

    “This spike [in human error] is just showing how fast our financial services institutions are changing to meet the needs of a changing business environment,” said Fritchey. Though there is a high demand to fill roles with data management skills, there is a talent shortage. “Recruitment is one of the biggest challenges,” he noted.

    That said, financial services do report fewer issues in other areas. For example, database access management is handled more efficiently at financial services. Whereas ad hoc user access issues have doubled in other sectors, financial services reported no significant change.

    Looking to the future, respondents indicate cloud migration, migrating to new server versions and improving performances as the top three impending challenges.

    Why Do Financial Services Outperform?

    Data demonstrates financial services on a superior overall curve when it comes to database DevOps. But why is this?

    “The answer is pretty simple,” said Fritchey. “Finance is driven by data. Therefore, they’ve always put the time and effort into protecting that information, and monitoring your systems is a fundamental aspect of data protection.”

    The financial sector is also prone to more security exploits and data privacy issues. Such concerns amplify the need for quality monitoring.

    “Organizations with good monitoring in place either also have better security or can spot vulnerabilities faster,” said Fritchey. With such measures in place, if a breach does occur, such organizations can react rapidly.

    International regulations such as GDPR or PSD2 mean financial services must meet stringent compliances. For Fritchey, active investment in quality database monitoring is part of this process.

    “The need to be able to operate across borders means that your systems must meet multiple compliance regimes. It simply makes sense to set the most stringent standards to ensure you can easily operate in the international sphere,” he said. “Monitoring is a fundamental aspect of meeting these compliance requirements.”

    The Future of Database Monitoring

    Financial services inherently require greater fault tolerance, and database monitoring is helping such services reach bank-grade security. As most respondents estimate their deployment frequency to increase in the next year, a greater focus on database integrity will be essential to keep pace.

    The financial services sector appears to be well-positioned for continued growth. With a shorter MTTD and a faster MTTR, financial IT is significantly more advanced than other sectors when it comes to database change frequency and issue remediation.

    “The fact that those with monitoring in place are also those who can more quickly deliver value through some type of DevOps process should cause people to pay attention,” added Fritchey. “All of this combines to make for a better overall organization who does more for their clients.”

  • Survey Surfaces High Reliance on DevOps to Build and Deploy APIs

    A survey of 13,586 IT professionals who work with application programming interfaces (APIs) published today by Postman, provider of an API development platform, finds best DevOps practices are now widely employed to both produce and consume APIs.

    The primary method through which teams working on APIs collaborate is by sharing URLs (42%). However, publishing API artifacts to GitLab, GitHub, Bitbucket or other repositories came in a close second at 40%, followed by publishing API documentation to an API portal (39%) and instant messaging (28%).

    When queried about change management practices specifically, Git repositories topped the list at 63%, followed by versioning APIs (59%), versioning server code (34.6%), versioning client code (27.8%) and semantic versioning (21%).

    Respondents said when it comes to deploying APIs, the most widely used option was continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines (53%).

    A total of 77% of respondents listed their functional area as engineering/development, followed by DevOps/API Ops at 34% and developer relations/evangelism (13%).

    Among DevOps practitioners that participated in the survey, Jenkins is the most widely employed platform (41%), followed by AWS DevOps (30.7%) and Azure DevOps (26.1%).

    Overall, the survey finds REST is still the dominant architectural style for APIs (93%), followed by webhooks (34%), SOAP (33%) and GraphQL (23%). JSON Schema is the dominant API specification (76%), followed by Swagger 2.0 (44%), OpenAPI 3.0 (28%) and GraphQL (23 %).

    When asked to rate the percentage of their organization’s development effort spent working with APIs, 41% said more than half of the effort is spent on APIs.

    Kin Lane, chief evangelist for Postman, said the survey also makes it clear that more organizations have adopted an API-first philosophy to application development. Over 60% of respondents rated themselves as 5 or better out of 10 in terms of embracing an API-first philosophy.

    Nearly half of respondents said investment of time and resources into APIs will increase over the next 12 months, while another third stated that investments into APIs will stay the same. Eighty-five percent said APIs are playing a significant role in their digital business transformation initiatives, while nearly a third (31%) also noted APIs played a role in their organization’s ability to respond to COVID-19 by, for example, enabling customer communications or remote work options.

    APIs appear to have become a lot more stable in recent years, with more than half of respondents reporting APIs do not break, stop working or materially change specification often enough to matter.

    When it comes to producing APIs, the No. 1 obstacle by a wide margin is lack of time, while the No. 1 obstacle cited for consuming API is lack of documentation.

    The four most important factors individuals consider before integration with an API are reliability (72%), security (71%), performance (71%) and documentation (70%).

    Looking to future technologies, respondents appear to be most interested in microservices (49%), Kubernetes (44%) and containers (42%). Given the cloud-native attributes of those technologies, it appears all but certain the number of APIs strewn across the extended enterprise is about to increase exponentially.

  • Shifting Left With DevSecOps: ESG Report Exposes Difficulties

    Shifting Left With DevSecOps: ESG Report Exposes Difficulties

    A recent report asks the tough questions about DevSecOps adoption, and the results are surprising

    In a world of increasing development velocity, companies are placing more responsibility on developers to enact quick deployments. Naturally, security is “shifting left” as well.

    Theoretically, DevSecOps sounds great, but it opens up many questions. Who exactly is responsible for security knowledge? Are cybersecurity training measures effective? Which tools excel at decreasing risk while maintaining release fluidity? Are AppSec tools aiding or adding unneeded friction?

    A report conducted by Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) sought to answer these pressing questions and expose trends around application development security. The study surveyed 378 IT, cybersecurity and application development professionals at organizations in North America.

    I recently met with Chris Eng, chief research officer at Veracode, and Dave Gruber, senior cybersecurity analyst at ESG, to dig deeper into the report’s findings.

    Security vs. Development

    There is still friction when attempting DevSecOps in practice. Eng recognizes a disconnect between security and development teams.

    “Most security teams lack an understanding of modern application development practices,” said Eng. Security may not realize how regularly code is pushed or understand the intricacies of tooling within a CI/CD pipeline. On the flip side, developers may not be well-versed in common container exploits and vulnerabilities.

    Organizations are pretty split when it comes to application security testing ownership. Thirty-one percent of organizations dedicate security analysts to manage application security. The development manager and security team jointly own responsibility at 29% of companies. Developer managers follow at 26%, and individual developers at 13%.

    To Eng, these figures reflect an evolution from traditional security testing to the way things are changing with faster development cycles. “Go back 10-plus years, and we had a centralized, dedicated security team responsible for managing AppSec,” described Eng.

    In modern times, security is shared or even furthered where developers themselves run tools by hand or automate security within CI/CD processes. Large companies, Eng noted, now often utilize a mix of those practices.

    Paradox: Secure Yet Vulnerable

    Seemingly, the most eye-opening part of the report was a paradox. The report found that most teams give their application security a high rating (36% gave their application security programs a 9 or 10, with a 7.92 mean). Yet, the majority say they regularly push vulnerable code (48% of respondents knowingly push vulnerable code regularly).

    Though it’s counterintuitive, organizations may knowingly push out vulnerable code for many reasons. “You’ve promised a release, customers are waiting, ” said Eng. “Revenue is waiting. What are the implications of pushing that release?” Teams may not have time to fix vulnerable code, or it may simply not be worth it.

    Publishing vulnerable code may also be a symptom of placing testing too late in the release process. “That’s why there is this trend to shift left,” added Gruber.

    Gauging DevSecOps Success

    The above findings underscore a reality of IT security: To keep pace, software providers must accept a level of risk. In fact, business success may depend on it.

    “The effectiveness of the programs isn’t necessarily measured with how many times you’ve shipped your code with no vulnerabilities,” said Gruber. “Success is that we understand the risk, we have mitigated the risk at the level we believe is right for the organization, and have the right level of control over the process.”

    Companies must weigh the cost of improper DevSecOps and mitigate imminent risk to maintain release agility.

    Application Security Tools: Finding Balance

    At modern companies with quick-release cadences, “CI integrative security tools are way more prevalent and baked into the process,” noted Eng. Yet, 26% of respondents indicate security tooling friction and ineffective tooling usage.

    Whereas InfoSec teams are usually the ones dictating policies, developers have much influence in the tooling selection. Thus, tools must appeal to the developer experience, fitting into their established workflows.

    “We have to build a habit around it,” said Eng. Frictionless tools that continually scan within an IDE, for example, can enable developers to fix an issue on the spot and foster future behaviors.

    At the same time, you must set standards and avoid governance issues. This requires control and observability. “The balance here is that you want developers to be able to integrate something tightly into their toolchain,” said Eng. “But InfoSec needs a bird’s eye view on the organization.”

    Developers Lack Knowledge to Mitigate Issues

    Though security tools may reveal vulnerabilities, they don’t always correlate with remediation. The ESG report found 29% of developers lack the knowledge to mitigate issues identified by security tools.

    There is a clear gap in the market when it comes to developer education around security. This could stem from computer science schooling, in which cybersecurity is rarely taught alongside programming languages.

    On the job, hands-on developer security training is also spotty. Thirty-five percent say that less than half of their development teams are participating in formal training. Only 15% of organizations have developers actively involved in security training.

    Just giving developers a laundry list of vulnerabilities doesn’t help mitigation. For Eng, what organizations require is habitual, recurring training with hands-on tools. “Try to simulate or provide a real-world environment for learning, identifying and patching these issues,” recommended Eng. Integrating tooling within the daily developer workflow can help with knowledge retention, because “if you don’t use it, you lose it.”

    Other best practices will only arise with a security habit. For example, most development environments ship with open defaults. “You need security training and tools to understand to restrict that appropriately,” noted Eng.

    That said, a wide variety of security tooling is already advancing this process. For example, 56% of organizations use API security vulnerability (ASV) scanning to identify and mitigate risk associated with API usage, helping secure applications as developers code dependencies.

    Final DevSecOps Thoughts

    The ESG study found 43% of participants believe DevOps integration is most important to improving AppSec programs. Yet, siloed roles and a lack of security education mean DevSecOps must still mature quite a bit to meet the security-shift-left vision.

    Other eye-opening findings included:

    • More than half of respondents (54%) use automated controls to identify and quarantine vulnerable images in their image repository.
    • The proliferation of AppSec tools on the market is a significant problem for 30% of companies.
    • AppSec spending is increasing, yet only 30% will protect more than three-quarters of their codebase 12 months from now.

    For more findings, check out the ESG Survey Report: Modern Application Development Security.

  • Survey Surfaces Impact of COVID-19 on DevOps Teams

    Survey Surfaces Impact of COVID-19 on DevOps Teams

    A survey of 500 IT and engineering professionals across software and finance industries published today by Harness, a provider of continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, suggests there is significant room to improve application development processes now that most DevOps teams are working from home due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

    The survey finds only 43% of developers said development velocity has increased since COVID-19, while just over half (52%) said they are happier in their roles since the pandemic began. Ravi Lachhman, a developer evangelist for Harness, said as velocity increases so does the need to automate DevOps processes across a distributed application development team. The level of automation achieved, in turn, has a direct impact on developer satisfaction.

    Despite any productivity concerns, however, nearly three-fourths of developers (74%) said their organization plans to keep a remote or distributed workforce following the pandemic. That compares to only 2% who said their teams were fully remote prior to the pandemic.

    On the plus side, developers are overwhelmingly satisfied (94%) with their employer’s investment in employee growth and development, and two-thirds (66%) said they value their companies even more than they did before the crisis. However, only a little more than half, (52%) said it was unlikely they would change jobs within the next year. Among developers who make less than $75,000, 54% said they are at least somewhat likely to change jobs, compared to 46% of those making more than that.

    Compensation was the most-cited priority for switching jobs. Over a third (35%) said that if they were to look for a new employer, their top priority would be better pay. That compares to 27% who would prioritize more opportunities for career and professional growth and 20% who would switch for the ability to work remotely. Another 13% would leave for better benefits, while 5% cited shorter hours.

    Almost two-thirds (60%) anticipated that further salary cuts or layoffs for their development teams are at least somewhat likely. So far, 28% of developers reported there have been layoffs at their organizations, with 22% saying those layoffs included members of their teams. Only 29% of developers said they have seen an increase in developer onboarding since the pandemic began, compared to 42% who saw a decrease. Another 29% saw no change.

    Nearly two-thirds of respondents who earn $150,000 or more are happier in their roles since COVID-19 began (64%), while 44% of those who make $75,000 or less are happier.

    Among developers over the age of 55, almost three-quarters (70%) said they are either less happy or their happiness has not changed. Interestingly, that compared with 43% of millennials. The report also noted both men and women feel they are compensated fairly, at 81% and 82%, respectively.

    The so-called “new normal” that DevOps teams are adjusting to is clearly taking a toll. For the most part, the transition to working from home full-time has not been as disruptive as many initially feared. However, it’s also clear many organizations will need to revisit how their DevOps workflows are constructed to accommodate the fact that most DevOps teams won’t be returning to an office anytime soon.

  • Survey: Cloud Security, DevOps Emerging as Enterprise Priorities

    Survey: Cloud Security, DevOps Emerging as Enterprise Priorities

    A survey published today by 2nd Watch, a provider of IT services, finds that in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, cloud security and DevOps have emerged as the top two priorities for large enterprise IT organizations.

    The survey queried more than 100 IT directors working at companies with at least $500 million in annual sales and IT budgets of at least $50 million per year, Three-quarters of respondents (75%) said they are prioritizing cloud security, followed by cloud-native culture change, also known as DevOps, (60%) and conferencing/collaboration (51%).

    Chris Garvey, executive vice president of product for 2nd Watch, said the report shows that not only are more large enterprises accelerating cloud adoption, but the projects being launched are also more strategic to the business.

    The survey finds 60% of respondents said they are prioritizing projects with potentially large payoffs over cost-conscious projects. Nearly half (47%) said now is the time to position their company for the long haul, while 39% said they are accelerating the use of the cloud to deliver digital products. As part of those efforts, more than a third (34%) said they are accelerating the migration of applications to the cloud.

    A total of 93% of respondents use at least two cloud platforms, with Microsoft Azure being the most widely employed.

    Cloud computing platforms, however, are not without their challenges. Most respondents (82%) said they’ve experienced cloud-related challenges, with 77% reporting those issues have caused them to alter their cloud strategies. Nearly half (46%) said experiencing cloud security-related challenges, while 48% said cloud computing turned out to be more expensive than initially anticipated.

    The top challenges identified are providing remote workers access to corporate systems (63%), providing remote worker support (57%) and conferencing/collaboration systems that haven’t worked as expected (47%). Half said they are accelerating the use of the cloud to support remote employees, with 58% expecting at least half of their company’s employees will become full-time remote workers in 2021.

    Overall, nearly two-thirds (64%) said their IT related budgets have stayed the same or grown since COVID-19 began, and 59% said their cloud budgets would increase over the next 12 months. A total of 80%, however, acknowledged they are concerned COVID-19 will continue to impact their IT strategy and only half (50%) said they were confident in their organization’s ability to adjust.

    Primary areas of focus over the next 12 months include databases (42%), internet of things (39%), data warehousing (35%), artificial intelligence/machine learning (34%) and data lakes (26%).

    Garvey said large enterprises are clearly looking to take advantage of their deeper pockets to accelerate digital transformation initiatives at a time when smaller rivals may not be able to invest. However, because the pandemic has impacted some verticals more adversely than others, the level of digital business transformation occurring across different vertical sectors is uneven, he noted.

    It may be a while before the winners and losers are identified in the wake of the pandemic. However, it’s clear large organizations are betting on IT now more than ever to differentiate themselves. As large organizations assess the damage from the pandemic, it’s likely that the future of many of these companies will depend on the degree to which they can adopt a wide array of not just emerging technology platforms, but also the processes required to master them.

  • Pandemic Provides IT Teams a Chance to Shine

    Pandemic Provides IT Teams a Chance to Shine

    Few would argue that the novel coronavirus pandemic hasn’t dramatically changed enterprise IT. This is especially so when it comes to both the management of IT as well as the very relationship between IT staff and the rest of the business. But how many would have predicted that the relationship between IT and business leaders would have improved since the start of the pandemic?

    According to a recent survey, that’s been precisely the outcome for roughly 43% of organizations. The study is from IT services provider Ensono, which questioned 153 IT decision-makers within the United States and the UK. The research was conducted during the first week of July 2020.

    Further, 32% of IT decision-makers said that their IT budgets are increasing, and 33% have been given more scope to define IT spending since the beginning of the pandemic. Just 5% said that they’ve been given less scope to define their IT spending.

    The survey also confirmed that the pandemic has increased pressure for enterprises to transform themselves digitally. Fortunately, IT has proven its value, at least when it comes to reliability. Despite staff having to work remotely and maintain socially distant, thereby increasing demand for software access, 1 in 4 respondents said they didn’t face any downtime issues. At the same time, only 2% reported between 24 and 48 hours of downtime.

    Additionally, 38% of respondents said that the pandemic helped to improve their understanding of IT. In comparison, 30% of IT decision-makers said they now have more control over business decisions, while only 4% said they now have less control. For 10%, there has been no perceived change in their relationship with the rest of the business outside IT.

    These findings echo those of an earlier study this year from services provider BDO, whose 2020 Digital Transformation Survey, which measured the digital transformation efforts of middle-market organizations, found many of the digital transformation failures stemmed from leadership failures. These include lack of skills or training (41%), employee pushback (30%), poor communication or project management (28%) and lack of leadership or vision (28%) as top reasons for digital efforts failing. “Change readiness is a function of culture, commitment, and capacity to meet the objective and see it through. In a time of competing priorities, systemizing an approach to change management is more essential to organizational agility than ever,” BDO said in its statement.

    It’s certainly essential for those organizations that participated in the Ensono survey, with 56% reporting being under greater urgency to digitally transform their business and about 25% of organizations reporting that events have forced them to begin their digitalization efforts immediately.