Gartner Insights Abstract

Trends to Guide Security Automation Decisions in Software Engineering

Published: 16 February 2024

Summary

Automating security in software engineering is key to achieving both security and delivery outcomes. Software engineering leaders can use this benchmarking data to guide their decisions on automation tools and activities to automate, as well as work around barriers to automating security activities.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • Organizations that automate more security activities can expect an estimated 15% improvement in their ability to meet targets on both security and delivery outcomes.

  • Many types of security automation are not yet widespread. Fewer than 50% of respondents to our survey were fully or mostly automating any of the 12 activities we asked about.

  • Application security testing (AST) andsigning and hashing are among the more commonly automated security activities. The least commonly automated activities are remediation based on testing output, software bills of materials (SBOMs) generation and threat modeling.

  • Organizations use a range of tools and technologies to automate

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Analysts:

Mary Joy Neha Agarwal Bestin Samuel

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