DevOps leaders embracing automation

CIOs and senior DevOps managers are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain software reliability and security due to growing demand for continuous release cycles and the rising complexity of cloud-native environments, a new survey from Dynatrace has suggested.

Among Australian respondents, 78% reported that digital transformation has accelerated in the past 12 months, with 91% of Australian organisations now deploying software updates into production every 12 hours or less.

As a result, Australian DevOps teams are now spending a third of their time on manual tasks involving detecting code quality issues and vulnerabilities, the survey has suggested. Meanwhile, 72% are forced to make trade-offs between quality, security and user experience to meet the need for rapid transformation.

Australian CIOs and DevOps teams are accordingly under increasing pressure to building a ‘DevSecOps’ culture, which will involve automating more of the CI/CD pipeline, among other things.

The survey found that Australian organisations plan to increase their spending on automation across development, security and operations by 41% by next year. But 91% of Australian CIOs say they need to improve their trust in the accuracy of AI’s decisions before fully embracing automation.

Dynatrace Founder and CTO Bernd Greifeneder said there is an increasing acknowledgement among organisations that manual approaches aren’t scalable to the extent of the task required.

“Teams can’t afford to waste time and effort chasing false positives, searching for vulnerabilities whenever a new threat alert is raised or conducting forensics to understand whether data has been compromised. They need to work together to drive faster, more secure innovation,” he said.

“Automation and modern delivery practices such as DevSecOps are key to this, but teams need to trust that their AI is reaching the right conclusions about the risk impact of a particular vulnerability. To accomplish this, organisations require a unified platform that can converge observability and security data to eliminate the silos between teams.”

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