By: Neal England

Global cyber-attacks have increased nearly 32% in Q2 2022 compared to Q2 2021, an all-time high. This year’s record level breaches stem from vulnerabilities created out of the vast expansion of commercial and government digital footprints, increasing hybrid/remote work models, ever-growing cloud dependency, and obsolete central security controls.

According to IBM’s 2019 Cost of Data Breach Report, the average data breach cost increased from $3.6 million in 2018 to nearly $4M in 2019. By 2022, the average data breach cost had eclipsed $9M.

Ransomware and cyber criminals top current target is the education/research sector, an industry facing a 53% increase in cyber-attacks in Q2 2022 over Q1 2021 and up 24% from Q1 2022 according to Avast Researchers. The government/military sector, the next most favored target, is experiencing a 44% increase in attacks over the same period last year. ISP/MSP, healthcare, and communication sectors are also realizing double-digit YoY cyber-attack increases.

The Need for DevSecOps

DevSecOps (Development, Security, and Operations) is a rapidly evolving application security trend designed to assist in incident management by integrating security early into the software development life cycle (SDLC) rather than the final stages. Leveraging Agile methodologies for implementation, DevSecOps is a practice where teams place a heavy emphasis on sharing accountability for security and work collaboratively towards a common goal of assimilating security protection into each phase of the software development workflow. As software is developed, security is addressed and integrated as issues emerge and before applications enter production. The result is effective, easier, and faster fixes that won’t stall the development cycle, because the faster bugs can be proactively found, the less expensive it is to fix them early on rather than later.

According to Data Bridge Market Research, the growing DevSecOps market was $2.6B in 2021 and is expected to exceed $23B by 2029, a 31.5% CAGR projection. With this robust market growth so grows the talent demand for DevSecOps professionals who have the skills, collaboration, and understanding about development and operations to make effective security a key part of the SDLC.

It is clear that commercial and government/military organizations are substantially increasing their adoption and investments into DevSecOps methodology to effectively mitigate continuously growing cybersecurity threats.