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Report: More Appreciate the Value of Observability

Observability may be a core tenet of any best DevOps practice, but the number of organizations that actually engage in it is still not nearly as high as it should.

A survey of 400 software engineers published this week by Honeycomb, a provider of an observability platform, finds nearly half said they are not currently practicing observability. However, the number of organizations that expect to embrace it is growing. The Honeycomb survey finds 75% of those respondents who haven’t implemented an observability plan to do so at an advanced level within the next two years.

Conducted by ClearPath Strategies, the survey also finds that about a third of respondents are still evolving their observability capabilities. Only 10% of survey respondents exhibited what the survey describes as highly advanced capabilities.

Liz Fong-Jones, principal developer advocate for Honeycomb, there is some correlation between the number of developers an organization employs and their reliance on observability. Among organizations that have advanced observability capabilities, 42% have more than 100 developers.

In general, Fong-Jones said interest in observability is on the rise because it is becoming much easier to instrument applications. The emergence of open source agent software has made it much easier for observability platforms to collect relevant metrics that go way beyond simply monitoring an IT environment by sampling application traffic and analyzing logs, she noted. Observability platforms, in contrast, make use of technologies such as dynamic tracing to provide deeper insights into the root cause of an application issue.

That approach also ties more closely to a specific user benefit versus simply collecting metrics that don’t surface any actionable intelligence, she added.

Fong-Jones noted that observability platforms are now also playing a key role in eliminating technical debt. As organizations embrace microservices, for example, it’s becoming more challenging to identify bottlenecks and potentially redundant microservices. Observability platforms make it easier for DevOps teams to uncover these issues at a time when applications are becoming more complex, she said.

There’s no doubt reliance of observability platforms will continue to substantially increase as organizations dive deeper into best DevOps practices. Most applications deployed by most enterprise IT organizations are not that deeply instrumented. As instrumentation becomes more pervasive, IT organizations will be able to drive more value from observability platforms. That could be crucial because it’s not uncommon for IT teams to spend weeks trying to find the source of an issue that might only take a few minutes to fix.

Observability may not always be top of mind for IT teams but within the context of a best DevOps practice, it’s crucial. Many organizations are clearly racing to deploy applications without being able to observe how application code is behaving. In the absence of observability, it’s a foregone conclusion that tensions between developers and IT operations teams will rise. The challenge and the opportunity are to get everyone involved in IT on the same page in a way that ensures everyone involved is talking about the same thing at the same time.

May 7, 2020
Survey Surfaces Root Causes of DevSecOps Tension

Results of a survey published by SaltStack, a provider of IT automation tools, suggests tensions between cybersecurity and IT professionals on the one side and DevOps teams on the other are running high. According to the survey of 130 cybersecurity and IT leaders, 70% of respondents said their organization is sacrificing data security for faster innovation, with most cybersecurity and IT managers making a case for prioritizing data protection over innovation, speed to market and cost.

Alex Peay, senior vice president for product at SaltStack, said that while it’s unlikely cybersecurity and IT leaders will be able to slow down the pace of innovation within their organizations, the survey results make it clear IT organizations are struggling to keep pace.

On the plus side, the results also show that cybersecurity and IT operations teams are working more closely together. More than half—54%—of cybersecurity leaders said they communicate effectively with IT professionals, while 45% of IT professionals concurred.

Best DevSecOps processes are, of course, meant to bridge the divide between DevOps teams and the rest of the IT organization. The expectation is that by pushing more responsibility for cybersecurity to the left, the pressure on cybersecurity and IT teams would be reduced. However, DevSecOps adoption remains nascent at best—many DevOps teams still don’t have the tools required to implement security controls programmatically within their applications.

Even when they do have the tools needed to add security controls, organizations need to set up workflows that will enable cybersecurity teams to verify that those controls have been properly implemented. Given the chronic shortage of cybersecurity expertise, the rate at which applications are being deployed and updated easily overwhelms the amount of time cybersecurity teams have available to analyze modules of code that are now often updated several times a week. Most cybersecurity teams are already struggling to keep pace with patches for existing applications, let alone any new application modules.

Of course, there’s not a lot of love lost between developers and cybersecurity teams. DevOps teams generally blame cybersecurity teams for slowing down the rate at which applications are deployed. In fact, one of the primary reasons DevSecOps is gaining traction among developers is that it represents a way to remove cybersecurity professionals from the application development process.

Cybersecurity professionals, conversely, often view application developers as the root cause of the cybersecurity problem. Too many developers are reusing modules of code without first making sure those modules have been updated to address a known vulnerability. To add insult to injury, whenever a new vulnerability is discovered days, weeks or even months may go by before developers address it. To be fair, however, cybersecurity professionals are not especially adept at prioritizing vulnerabilities; as far as developers are concerned, the list of vulnerabilities presented is just one in a series of bugs that need to be addressed. Unless otherwise directed, developers will focus on bugs that impact features and performance before a potential security issue that has yet to manifest itself as an issue impacting end users.

In general, advances in DevSecOps are being made that should provide some much-needed relief to IT and cybersecurity professionals. It’s just slowing down the rate at which applications are deployed and updated might not be one of them.

May 7, 2020
Survey Finds More Data Disruption Occurring
A global survey of 1,000 IT decision-makers with more than 250 employees conducted by Dell Technologies finds on average organizations managed 13.53 petabytes (PB) of data in 2019, a nearly 40% increase since 2018.

The same survey also finds that as the amount of data has increased, so, too, has the cost of downtime. Those costs increased by 54% in the same period, resulting in an estimated total cost of $810,018 in 2019.

The survey also notes 82% of respondents suffered a disruptive event in the last 12 months, with the total cost of a data loss now on average exceeding $1 million.

Not surprisingly, the survey finds that a lot of the data that organizations are trying to protect resides in the cloud, thanks mainly to the rise of a variety of application use cases. The top five areas of investment cited by survey respondents include cloud-native applications (58%), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) (53%), software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications (51%), 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (49%), and Internet of Things/endpoints (36%).

Nearly, three-quarters of respondents (71%) noted these emerging technologies create more data protection complexity and 61% said they increase risks. The survey also finds 81% of respondents said their existing data protection solutions will not be able to meet all future business challenges.

Specific areas where existing data protection platforms are expected to fall short include being able to recover data after a cyberattack (69%), recover data from a data loss incident (64%), comply with regional data governance regulations (62%), and meeting backup and recovery service level objectives (62%).

Among organizations that have adopted these emerging technologies the percentage of organizations struggling with adequately protecting data is as follows:
- 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (67%)
- AI and ML platforms (64%)
- Cloud-native applications (60%)
- IoT and endpoint (59%)
- Robotic process automation (56%)
The survey also finds organizations prefer public cloud/SaaS (43%), hybrid cloud (42%) and private cloud (39%) as deployment environments for new applications. In the case of edge computing deployments, 62% cited private clouds as being the platform that will be relied on most to protect data.

Bob Ganley, senior marketing consultant for cloud at Dell EMC, said the biggest challenge for organizations will be finding a way to centrally manage backup and recovery across multiple cloud computing platforms. Those platforms inevitably will span multiple types of public and private clouds accessed as a service and deployed in local data centers. Most organizations are relying on a “mash-up” approach to cloud computing where there is no unified control plane, so as they add each new cloud platform their total cost increases, he said Ganley, noting it’s now only a matter of time before IT organizations start to centralize the management of those multiple clouds to rein in those costs.

It’s not clear to what degree that centralization effort will revolve around IT automation enabled by application programming interfaces (APIs) and best DevOps processes versus traditional data protection tools based on graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, given the amount of data involved, it is more than likely that existing approaches to data protection are not going to scale, so a fundamental change in how backup and recovery is managed is now all but inevitable.

— Mike Vizard
March 16, 2020
DevOps Brings Pressure to Bear on Database Management

The rise of DevOps is starting to have a significant impact on the rate at which databases now need to be deployed and updated. A global survey of more than 2,000 developers, database specialists and IT leaders conducted by Redgate Software, a provider of tools for automating the management of databases, finds nearly half (49%) are now deploying database changes in production at least once a week or more.

Kendra Little, DevOps advocate for Redgate Software, said most of the changes are being driven by the adoption of best DevOps practices that are now having a cascading impact on other functions in the IT environment.

However, the survey shows the adoption of DevOps remains uneven. Only 18% of respondents said they have adopted DevOps across all projects, while 36% said they have adopted DevOps across some projects. Another 14% said they are at the proof-of-concept stage. Only 13% said their organizations have no plans to adopt DevOps at all. Survey respondents in the financial services and insurance industry sectors have the highest levels of adoption, with more than 77% of respondents saying their organizations are either in proof of concepts (16%), have adopted across some projects (41%) or have adopted across all projects (20%).

Progress appears to be rapid among those that have adopted DevOps. Well over a third (37%) report that only 1% or less of their deployments introduce code defects that require hotfixes. That compares to 30% for all other groups.

The survey also revealed that more than half of respondents (55%) perform most or all of their business-critical database deployments while their systems are still online, with 75% of that group reporting that 10% or less of those deployments caused defects that require hotfixes. Nearly half (46%) are also employing some of automation to deploy databases, according to the survey.

Nevertheless, the survey makes it clear challenges remain. Disruptions to existing workflows and business was cited as the top barrier to adoption (23%), followed by lack of skills (22%) and lack of alignment between developers and operations (16%).

Little said the survey makes it apparent that database management needs to become more aligned with the software development life cycle (SDLC) with organizations transitioning to DevOps. Over a quarter of respondents (26%) said it is still somewhat or very difficult to get code reviews for database changes. A further 16% said that no code reviews are done for database changes early in the development cycle.

Less clear is who precisely is managing the database. Developers in the Age of DevOps are exercising more influence over what databases are employed. However, Little noted that 43% of organizations still have a database administrator managing their databases. That compares to 34% that rely on developers and 21% that have a combination of both. Over time, Little said most organizations will continue to shift toward a combination of both. That, of course, will require a significant amount of cultural change within most IT organizations, where all too often developers have tended to view DBAs as a bottleneck to be eliminated whenever and wherever possible.

— Mike Vizard

March 5, 2020
Survey Sees Open Source Adoption, Quality Gains

A survey of 959 IT leaders published this week by Red Hat finds increased reliance on and adoption of open source software is now being driven by perceived higher quality as much as it is cost concerns.

The survey finds higher quality of software (33%) was the top reason they chose open source, followed by lower total costs of ownership (30%) and better security (29%).

Gordon Haff, a technology evangelist for Red Hat, said the survey makes it clear that open source adoption is now being driven from the top-down as well as the bottom-up in most organizations. What’s changed is that open source software is now being used more broadly as more organizations appreciate how open source approaches to building software not only lower costs but also improve overall quality.

The survey identifies the top three use cases for employing open source software to be IT infrastructure modernization (60%), application development (53%) and DevOps (52%).

As part of that shift, 56% of respondents said they plan to increase usage of containers over the next 12 months. In fact, on average respondents said cloud-native applications already make up 25% of their portfolio, compared to an average of 36% for cloud-enabled applications and 39% for legacy applications. The combination of cloud-native and cloud-enabled applications (61%) already outnumber legacy applications (39%).

Over the next two years, 47% of respondents plan to either modernize (17%), rearchitect as cloud-enabled (16%) or rearchitect as cloud-native (14%) their legacy applications. Another 16% said they would sunset or decommission those applications.

Overall, the survey finds there has been a marked shift away from proprietary software. Only 42% said that more than half of the software they use today is proprietary, down from 55% a year ago. Two years from now only 32% said they expect proprietary software to account for more than half their portfolio. On average, respondents said 36% of their organization’s software is open source, which in two years is expected to increase to 44% in two years. A total of 77% said they would increase usage of open source software over the next 12 months.

However, barriers to adoption of open source software remain. Security of the code (38%), level of support (37%), compatibility (34%) and lack of internal skills (33%) were all cited as ongoing issues.

The top three areas in terms of infrastructure where enterprise open source solutions are being used today are security (52%), cloud management tools (51%), database (49%) and big data analytics (47%). A total of 83% said open source has been instrumental in their organization’s ability to take advantage of cloud architectures. Almost two-thirds (63%) said they have a hybrid cloud infrastructure environment today. Among the 37% that don’t, more than half (54%) plan to have a hybrid cloud infrastructure environment within the next 24 months.

It’s apparent that open source software is now everywhere. The real challenge now is finding a way to manage it all.

— Mike Vizard

February 21, 2020
Are US Workers Threatened by Automation?

There’s been plenty of predictions about the impact of automation on the workforce: from enhancing the ability of workers to do their jobs to those who argue intelligent automation will eventually decimate the human workforce. The issue even made it to the Democratic presidential 2020 primary race with candidate Andrew Yang’s “Freedom Dividend.”

Still, if a recently published survey from business process automation provider Sykes is any indication, American workers aren’t very concerned. In fact, two-thirds of those Americans surveyed indicated they have yet to see automation on the job: 66% said that automation did not assist them with repetitive tasks in 2019. That response diverged with millennials (those 25 to 34 in this survey), with 41% saying that automaton has assisted them in their jobs last year.

Most Americans show a positive attitude toward on-the-job automation. According to the survey, 63% of respondents said that they could be better at their jobs if automating certain tasks enabled them to do more in less time. Not surprisingly, the percentage was highest, 71%, with the youngest (18 to 24) age group. Further, two-thirds of respondents said they would more likely apply at a company that is investing in automation technologies.

Indeed, the majority (58%) of respondent employers are actually providing some or a lot of training or other resources to help employees keep current with technological change.

The vast majority, 84%, of respondents believe their jobs will soon involve new automation technologies and expect some of their work to be completed by automation in 2020. While most respondents were open to increasingly working with automation to complete their jobs, few want to work for bots. The majority, a sizable 87%, said they are more willing to take orders from a human than a software bot (13%).

What industries do respondents think will be the most impacted by automation? In order, the U.S. workers surveyed believe manufacturing (65%), telecommunications (50%), and transportation (38%).

When it comes to public programs designed to mitigate the impact of automation on the workforce. However, 57% of workers believe that the U.S. government has a responsibility to compensate workers whose jobs are lost to automation. Of those, only 32% believe Universal Basic Income is the way to address jobs lost to automation, while 25% look to the existing welfare system. About 43% of workers do not think it’s the government’s role to compensate those whose lost their job because of automation.

The Sykes survey is based on the responses of 1,500 employed within the United States.

— George V. Hulme

January 24, 2020
Certificates a Fly in the DevOps Ointment

The way cybersecurity teams have managed certificates is turning out to be a major impedance that could best be addressed by more organizations adopting best DevSecOps practices in 2020.

A survey of 108 attendees at the recent DevOps Enterprise Summit 2019 conference conducted by Venafi, a provider of tools for assigning identities to machines, finds 75% of respondents said they are concerned that corporate certificate issuance policies slow down development.

In addition, 39% of respondents believe developers should be able to circumvent corporate certificate issuance policies to meet service level agreements (SLAs) and about half (48%) said they are confident that developers always request certificates through authorized channels.

Kevin Bocek, vice president of security strategy and threat intelligence at Venafi, said the root cause of the friction between developers and cybersecurity teams can be traced to reliance on ticket-based systems for managing IT. DevOps teams in the age of the software engineer are building and deploying applications faster than ticket-based systems based on manual requests can keep up with, he said.

Rather than wait on IT Operations teams, DevOps teams are doing an end-run as business leaders push for applications to be deployed faster. In many cases, DevOps teams are attaining certificates directly from a cloud service provider such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bocek noted. Unfortunately, that can lead to other issues: More than half of respondents(55%) said their organization experienced a certificate-related outage in the past 12 months. Not all those outages are likely to have resulted from DevOps teams working without internal IT, but it does confirm how deeply flawed the existing process of issuing certifications already is.

To address that issue, Bocek said organizations will need to shift to an approach for issuing trusted certificates that is based on a standard set of REST application programming interfaces (APIs) and is a natural extension of the DevOps processes baked into a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline.

Unfortunately, most organizations are not especially aware of best practices for issuing trusted certificates. The Venafi survey found three-quarters of respondents (75%) are unfamiliar with the “Securing Web Transactions 1800-16 Practice Guide,” available in draft form from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Bocek said the days when cybersecurity teams could employ certificates as a means for governing when applications are deployed are all but over. Cybersecurity teams need to collaborate with DevOps teams to define a set of best DevSecOps processes through which trusted certificates still play a role in helping secure the IT environment without slowing down the application deployment process, he said.

It may take a while for DevOps teams and cybersecurity professionals to get on the same page in terms of issuing certificates. However, as pressure to deploy applications faster continues to mount, cybersecurity teams will need to adjust their policies and processes. How certificates are issued may be as good a place to start their DevSecOps transition as any.

— Mike Vizard

January 6, 2020
Survey Sees More Complex API Challenges Ahead

A survey of more than 10,000 developers of application programming interfaces (APIs) suggests there’s lots of room for improving the overall efficiency of API lifecycle management.

The survey was conducted by Postman, a provider of a platform for building APIs. Respondents on average said they only spend a quarter of their time (26%) on the development of APIs. The rest of the time is consumed by debugging and manual testing (22%), automated testing (11%), designing and mocking APIs (11%), managing others (9%), documentation (7%), monitoring (6%) and publishing (4%). A full 70% said they are spending more time on manual testing and debugging than they thought they should.

All that time spent on manual testing and debugging may be having an adverse impact on the number of APIs that can be built, tested and deployed at a time when a transition to microservices-based architectures is requiring organizations to build and support more than ever.

According to the survey results, about a quarter of respondents (24%) work with more than 20 APIs. Well over half those employed on average (53%) are for internal use, compared to 28% employed specifically for integration and 19% that are made public.

In terms of technologies survey respondents are most excited about for the coming year, microservices (54%), containers (46%) and serverless computing frameworks (44%) top the list.

As far as the performance is concerned, survey respondents are evenly split. Just under half (48%) said they feel that their APIs do not break, stop working or materially change specification often enough to matter. However, 28% said these issues arise on a monthly basis, while 16% said they deal with these issues weekly. Another 3% said it was a daily challenge.

In terms of security, survey respondents are relatively confident: Nearly three-quarters of respondents (73%) said they feel that their APIs are “very secure” or have “above-average security.” Only 2% said they felt they were not at all secure.

It’s hard to say how secure any API is without testing it. Rebecca Johnston-Gilbert, a marketing manager for Postman, said it’s apparent more organizations are starting to address security at the design phase rather than after the API has been built and deployed. Many organizations have already adopted an API-first approach to application development that enables them to manage them in isolation from the applications they are designed to support, she said.

Among other survey findings, 73% of survey respondents said they work on a team of 10 members or less, while a quarter (26%) work on teams with 22 to 50 members. In addition, 78% of respondents have five or fewer years of experience in developing APIs.

In general, survey respondents said they would like to see improvements in the areas of documentation (64%), standardization (59%) and sample code (58%), which suggests consuming APIs is still not all that simple.

There is no doubt organizations increasingly will be applying best DevOps practices to the building and maintaining APIs. The challenge organizations face is, not only do they need to build and maintain what could soon be hundreds (if not thousands) of APIs to support microservices but also those APIs will need to be a lot more resilient as the dependencies between microservices exponentially increase.

— Mike Vizard

December 16, 2019
Survey: DevSecOps Progress Remains Elusive

Results of a survey of 103 IT professionals attending the recent DeveloperWeek Austin conference suggests that awareness of cybersecurity issues is clearly rising among developers, yet most organizations still have a long way to go toward before approaching anything resembling adoption of best DevSecOps practices.

Conducted by WhiteHat Security, a unit of NTT Communications, the survey on DevSecOps adoption finds nearly 75% of developers worry about the security and 85% rank security as being a very important element of the coding and development process. However, nearly half of the respondents said their development teams lack a dedicated cybersecurity expert. Only 30% of respondents said they have achieved security certifications in their current or prior roles.

More than half (57%) of survey respondents said their teams have the right application security tools in place to incorporate security into the software development life cycle (SDLC). Among those respondents who do use application security tools, a third (33%) scan for vulnerabilities daily, while 29% said they scan weekly and 20% said monthly. The remaining 18% scanned either quarterly, annually or at random.

Also, 14% said they have not been given the proper tools to incorporate security into the SDLC and a third (33%) were unsure what their organizations provided in terms of cybersecurity tools.

While the survey finds 57% are realizing that application security should be a key part of the SDLC, it also finds 43% of respondents still prioritize meeting their application release deadlines over security.

WhiteHat CTO Anthony Bettini said it is apparent organizations are struggling to strike a balance between application delivery velocity and security. Organizations are under pressure to digitize more processes faster. However, that pressure can result in a lot more friction being created between developers trying to meet a deadline and cybersecurity professionals who ultimately are held accountable for the integrity of the overall IT environment, he noted.

To bridge that divide, Bettini said a lot more work needs to be done in terms of driving the convergence of processes, people and tooling required to achieve DevSecOps. On the plus side, however, he noted within many organizations, DevSecOps is starting to supersede DevOps as a development philosophy.

The biggest issue organizations may need to worry about as they strive to achieve that goal may be burnout. The survey finds more than half (52%) of participants have experienced burnout as a result of the intense pressures to deliver the applications on time that are secure.

Overall, the survey makes it clear developers at the very least are willing to pay a lot more attention to cybersecurity. Compared to the way developers tended to view cybersecurity just a few short years ago, that alone represents substantial progress. The challenge organizations face now is finding a way to make it as simple as possible for developers to do the right thing from a cybersecurity perspective. There always will be the natural temptation to address a security issue later in the development cycle to meet a deadline. The trouble is that when cybersecurity issues continue to get kicked down the DevOps road, they all too often wind up becoming a major issue after an application has already been deployed in a production environment.

— Mike Vizard

December 13, 2019
Survey Sees Massive Adoption of Microservices

Under increasing pressure to innovate faster, a majority (84%) of organizations taking part in a recent survey have already embraced microservices.

The survey, conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of API management platform provider Kong, polled 200 senior IT leaders in organizations with more than 1,000 employees. Among the results, 89% of technology leaders agree that companies that are not able to effectively support microservices will be less able to compete in the future.

The report also finds on average organizations are running 184 microservices, with 60% of respondents running 50 or more. The primary reasons cited for adopting microservices are improvements to security (56%), increased development speed (55%), increased speed of integrating new technologies (53%), improved infrastructure flexibility (53%) and improved collaboration across teams (46%).

Kong CTO Marco Palladino said the report makes it clear that just about every organization is on a journey to making a transition to microservices as part of an effort to reduce reliance on inflexible monolithic applications. Initially, that transition involves lifting and shifting monolithic applications in the cloud before decoupling functions using microservices, he said.

As part of that journey, Palladino noted, the survey also finds significant microservices challenges remain, including ensuring security (36%), integration with legacy applications (32%), the complexity of management (31%) and updating API documentation (31%).

Despite these concerns, however, more than 80% of survey respondents who have adopted microservices report that their organization performs well against metrics for development efficiency, the ability to use new platforms, collaboration across teams and sharing of services across applications.

Overall, a full 90% of respondents said securely connecting applications and ensuring performance at scale collectively represent one of the greatest technical challenges of the 21st century. Also, 71% said they believe that organizations would be out of business within six years if they fail to keep pace with innovation in their industry. For public companies, the urgency is even greater, with 39% reporting they believe organizations will be out of business in less than three years if they fail to keep pace with innovation. Overall, 57% of technology leaders feel organizations are concerned that they are at risk of competitive displacement.

Pressure on IT leaders is high as a result. Nearly three-quarters of respondents (74%) agree that a failed digital transformation effort will result in a missed promotion, lost bonus or even termination. The report identifies the top three priorities for IT leaders as improving efficiency (47%), reducing cost (41%) and increasing security (40%).

Technology leaders, however, continue to place the highest importance on the availability (75%), security (74%), performance (65%) and scalability (64%). At the same time, technology leaders are focused on faster development speeds (95%), increased collaboration (94%) and reduced deployment risks (93%) as key desired outcomes for adopting any new technologies.

The challenges most cited in terms of achieving those agility goals are the complexity of using multiple technologies (35%), lack of automation (32%) and reliance on legacy technologies (29%).

The survey also notes 83% of organizations are relying on open source software to become more agile. The most commonly used open source technologies are databases (64%), containers (48%), API gateways (41%), infrastructure automation (40%), container orchestration (37%) and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools (36%).

In terms of cloud adoption, Microsoft Azure (43%) narrowly beat Amazon Web Services (AWS) (42%), with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) coming in third at 27%.

On the plus side, 78% of respondents said their organizations are increasing IT budgets in the coming year, with 27% of public companies expecting their budgets to grow 26% or more. Nearly 90% of companies will also be increasing headcount, with 56% hiring internally and 31% relying on more freelancers and/or outsourcing to meet hiring goals.

Hopefully, with that increased funding more organizations will be able to strike that elusive balance between stability and innovation.

— Mike Vizard

December 12, 2019