Survey reveals increasing IT investment in containers

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.

That’s up considerably from two years ago, when just 67 percent of teams were running container technologies in production, according to the 2019 Annual Container Adoption Survey from Portworx and Aqua Security.

The report features insights from over 500 IT professionals across a variety of industries and company sizes. The survey, conducted in April and May, asked questions about the state of container usage, tooling, environments and barriers to adoption, to get a snapshot of the container market landscape today and its evolution over time.

Yet despite their pervasiveness, the report highlights that 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%). 

Other Key Findings:

• Organisations are making bigger investments in containers. In 2019, nearly one in five organisations 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 challenges, 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 organisation’s security team, with a joint responsibility or DevSecOps in second place (24%). However, respondents’ own roles influenced their answer, with 47% of DevOps respondents naming DevSecOps as the main owner and 54% of Security respondents named Security as the main owner. 

Download the full 2019 Portworx & Aqua Security Container Adoption Survey Report here.