Companies increasingly investing in container adoption, security remains an issue

87 percent of IT professionals are now running container technologies, with 90 percent of those running in production and 7 in 10 running at least 40 percent of their application portfolio in containers — an impressive increase from two years ago, when just 67 percent of teams were running container technologies in production, a Portworx and Aqua Security survey reveals.

Hurdles

Yet despite their pervasiveness, containers aren’t without hurdles: when asked to name their top challenges to container adoption, respondents most frequently cited security (51%), data management (40%) and cross-cloud/multiple cloud support (36%).

“Container technologies are now used to run mission-critical enterprise applications, which means security in cloud native environments must be made absolutely bulletproof to protect enterprises’ most sensitive data and applications,” said Rani Osnat, VP of Product Marketing, Aqua Security.

“As our survey with Portworx reveals, IT professionals recognize this need and will not accept trade-offs when they move to cloud native computing. Security will always be top of mind for enterprises, even as they capitalize on the increased speed and innovation that containers bring.”

Other key findings

• Organizations are making bigger investments in containers. In 2019, nearly one in five organizations is spending over $1 million annually on containers (17%). Compare this to just four percent in 2016.
• Data security tops the list of security challenges with a super majority of respondents (61%) listing this as their top security challenge, followed by vulnerability management (43%) and runtime protection (34%).
• For the third year in a row, increasing developer speed and efficiency is the primary driver of container adoption with 37 percent of respondents listing it as the top benefit.
• When asked which team bears the main responsibility for container security, most (31%) named the organization’s security team, with a joint responsibility or DevSecOps in second place (24%). However, respondents’ own roles influenced their answer, with 47 percent of DevOps respondents naming DevSecOps as the main owner and 54 percent of security respondents named security as the main owner.