Data Theorem commissioned Enterprise Strategy Group to survey 371 IT and cybersecurity professionals who had responsibility for cloud programs at organizations in North America to look at how data protection and security standards are changing because of the newer mixing of cloud applications alongside onsite processing.

They have just released the results as "Security for DevOps – Enterprise Survey Report."

It found that only 8% of companies are securing 75% or more of their cloud-native applications with DevSecOps practices today. That number rose to 68% of companies saying that they will be securing 75% or more of their cloud-native applications with DevSecOps practices in two years.

The surveyed organizations are mature cloud users in terms of public cloud services and/or containers. Survey participants represented a wide range of industries, including manufacturing, financial services, healthcare, communications and media, retail, government, and business services.

API security was the top area that was reported for current or projected incremental spend. API security was also reported as most important by respondents among the cloud-native application security controls, at 37%.

Showing how teams have divided, 82% of organizations have different teams assigned to secure cloud-native apps. Of this group, 50% of respondents' organizations plan to merge these responsibilities in the future, while 32% of respondents' organizations do not plan to merge these responsibilities.

Also, over half of respondents indicated their organization's software developers were already using serverless functions to some extent. Another 44% of the developers were either evaluating or planning to start using serverless within the next two years.

Due to a perception that existing security controls do not support cloud-native applications, the report found that many organizations have turned to a series of point tools managed by separate teams. However, this just exacerbates the complexity problem as 73% of respondents believe that their organization uses too many specialized products to properly secure cloud-native applications.

Organizations diverge as to the stage at which they introduce security controls to protect cloud-native applications. While more than one in five view the importance of pre-deployment and runtime security equally, 40% prioritize runtime controls, with the remaining 37% prioritizing a pre-deployment approach.

When asked what are the most important pre-deployment cloud-native application security controls, software vulnerability scanning of registry-resident container images came in first at 26%. The next most important pre-deployment cloud-native application security control was API vulnerability management, at 25%.

Respondents felt that deployment flexibility and support for all types of servers and compute platforms were the top two answers (both at 38%) for the most important attributes of products used to secure cloud-native apps.

"ESG's industry report is aligned with what we've long suspected with organizations, and with what we have witnessed in the industry," said Doug Dooley, Data Theorem COO in a prepared statement. "Production workloads are shifting to public cloud platforms, and organizations are quickly adopting serverless functions. They need to understand the associated risks and new threat model they are facing, and the means of addressing these cloud native and API risks."

— Larry Loeb has written for many of the last century's major "dead tree" computer magazines, having been, among other things, a consulting editor for BYTE magazine and senior editor for the launch of WebWeek.