Report: 75% of companies are focusing on cloud-native apps

According to a new report by Tigera, 75% of companies are focusing development on cloud-native applications. The increased development and deployment of cloud-native applications also creates the need for more advanced observability and security capabilities. 

Growth in cloud-native workloads surged with the rapid digitalization caused by the pandemic and the need for more agile, powerful development tools. By 2025, Gartner estimates that more than 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021.

Given the dynamic, distributed, and ephemeral architecture of cloud-native applications, which in turn leads to a massive attack surface, it is not surprising that the Tigera survey highlighted that 96% of respondents find one or more aspects of cloud-native application security to be challenging. Nearly everyone surveyed (96%) stated that security, compliance and observability are the most challenging aspects of cloud-native applications.

The survey results also indicate that companies are looking to reduce application attack surface and quickly identify threats. In order to do that, they see workload-based IDS/IPS, DPI, DDoS protection and WAF (69%), workload access controls (59%) and microsegmentation (43%) as the top network security capabilities they need.

When asked about the biggest barriers to container adoption in their organization, respondents said the leading barrier was a lack of skilled resources (56%). Complexity came in second, with 53% of respondents citing it as a barrier, followed closely by security (52%). Other barriers respondents face include container orchestration management (42%), compliance (40%) and troubleshooting (30%). As one of the leading barriers to successful container adoption, it’s not surprising that most companies (98%) expressed a need for container security. The top two capabilities companies need for container security are runtime security (74%) and workload assurance (71%). Image scanning rounds out the top three, with 47% of organizations saying they need this capability for container security.

The survey results demonstrate that the move to cloud-native applications has strong momentum, however, companies need tools to increase visibility and provide security at the container, application, and network levels. These tools need to remove barriers and delays during development and deployment, while also reducing the risk from delayed time to market, security vulnerabilities and compliance violations.

Tigera commissioned Dimensional Research to survey more than 300 security and IT professionals from around the world. The survey sheds light on organizations’ needs and challenges when it comes to containers and cloud-native applications, specifically in the areas of security, observability, and compliance. Tigera focused on individuals with container responsibilities at companies with 10 or more employees. All respondents had direct container responsibilities.

Read the full report by Tigera.