Retailers must embrace DevSecOps to deliver a modern, resilient shopping experience

The explosive demand for online shopping and the dilution of brand loyalty are here to stay. IT leaders in the retail sector now face pressure to deliver exceptional experiences to improve conversion rates, drive loyalty, and increase revenue. If they fail to digitize and improve interactions, retailers risk losing customers to competitors. As a result, many retailers are shifting to DevSecOps to deliver reliable, secure shopping experiences for customers.

According to the 2023 Dynatrace CIO Report, 94% of retail IT leaders say digital transformation has accelerated during the past 12 months. 21% expect it to continue to speed up in the future.

The DevSecOps balancing act: speed, quality, and security

Retailers are seeking to drive faster transformation to delight customers. But CIOs confirm their critical applications are changing at an alarming rate. Almost one-quarter (24%) of IT leaders say their applications change every second. Nearly half (47%) of respondents state every minute, and 19% experience change every hour.

The pace of innovation is so fast that CIOs find it challenging to keep up while maintaining the reliability and security of omnichannel innovation. More than half (52%) of IT leaders across the sector confirm their organizations are forced to make tradeoffs between quality, security, and user experience to meet the need for rapid transformation within their digital services.

Additionally, 41% say they are forced to sacrifice code quality, and 37% say they sometimes sacrifice security. These tradeoffs can be costly for retailers as they try to optimize budgets, protect their supply chains, and maintain customer satisfaction in the drive to increase conversions and revenue.

Extending DevSecOps culture

This growing pressure is heightened by ongoing skills shortages across industries. 83% of retail CIOs confirm it is difficult to keep pace with demand given a lack of skilled developers. Despite this, just 38% believe hiring more professionals will help overcome complexities. Instead, 95% of IT leaders in the retail sector say extending a DevSecOps culture to more teams and applications will be key to accelerating digital transformation and driving faster, more secure software delivery.

However, this practice is still emerging for most retail organizations. According to the report, only 23% of CIOs say most or all of their teams adhere to a DevSecOps culture.

Retail IT leaders report the following as key barriers to embracing a DevSecOps approach:

• Security teams do not trust developers (58%).
• Developers perceive security teams as a blocker to innovation (48%).
• A lack of a unified platform for DevSecOps prevents having a single source of truth (27%).
• A siloed culture between DevOps and security teams prevents collaboration among teams (25%).

It’s clear that DevSecOps approaches are still underutilized in the retail industry.

Automate for success

Retailers are experiencing growing pressure to achieve higher conversions via digital customer interactions. Retail IT leaders must find ways to empower their teams to innovate faster without sacrificing software quality and security. Manual approaches simply aren’t scalable.

To address this issue, CIOs are increasing their investment in automation, including continuously testing software quality and security in production, or shift right (50%), and uplifting shift-right security automation to continually detect and block vulnerabilities in production (41%).

Observability and security must converge

Additionally, almost a third of CIOs throughout the sector confirm they have closely aligned their business, security, and operations teams to ensure they are all working toward the same goals. Data silos driven by multiple tools focused on specific areas of retail operations add complexity. This prevents teams from gaining contextual awareness of a problem quickly. It can also lead to poor prioritization, delayed time to insight, and incorrect root-cause determination. This can ultimately create negative customer experiences and weaker conversions.

In the fast-paced retail sector, teams require contextual analysis to quickly determine issues and then prioritize remediation and resolution. Teams can achieve this by using a single, AI-powered platform that converges observability and security. A unified platform breaks down silos between teams and brings together all the data onto a single pane of glass. As a result, teams can accelerate retail innovation, deliver frictionless shopping journeys, and maintain secure omnichannel applications.

In fact, 85% of retail CIOs say the convergence of observability and security will be critical to building a DevSecOps culture. Further, 89% believe increasing the use of AI and automation across DevOps and security will be key to scaling up DevSecOps practices.

Learn how Dynatrace can help you build and mature a successful DevSecOps culture so you can deliver reliable and resilient software at the speed your business demands.