Copia Automation, a supplier of industrial DevOps platform technology, has released its first annual
State of Industrial DevOps Report. Industrial DevOps applies IT DevOps principles and practices (such as visibility, automation, validation and quality control) to operations technology (OT) within industrial environments. The company claims this is “the first survey of its kind on the application of information technology DevOps principles and practices to the industrial sector.”
According to the report, which surveyed 200 executives at companies ranging from $300 million in revenues to more than $15 billion in revenues, industrial coding errors cause manufacturing shutdowns lasting 30 hours on average, costing $4.2 million per hour and $126 million per shutdown. Half of all downtime is caused by industrial code changes, code confusion, lack of visibility into industrial code and issues with programmable logic controllers (PLCs).
The survey also highlights significant OT vulnerabilities—the software and hardware that control industrial equipment. A possible cause for these vulnerabilities, according to Copia’s report, is ad hoc fixes in industrial programming, with 79% of respondents saying they are commonplace.
Copia stated that, while “these quick fixes can temporarily restore operations, they often leave organizations susceptible to breaches because the changes are not tracked. This makes it difficult or impossible to reliably maintain security updates. Considering the thousands of devices managed by manufacturers, the cascading effect of unmonitored changes can be substantial.”
“With coding errors and cybersecurity breaches shown as significant causes for downtime, manufacturers need to take every technological measure to protect their bottom line and ensure continuous operations with enhanced productivity,” said Adam Gluck, Copia co-founder and CEO. “Industrial DevOps delivers the technology and the process change to do this.”
Key survey findings:
- The most common causes of unplanned downtime are cybersecurity breaches (47%) followed by hardware malfunction (45%), coding/software issues (41%), human error (32%) and environmental disaster (25%).
- Respondents spend an average of 10X more time (45 hours per month) debugging code than reviewing it.
- The average percentage of downtime due to code changes is higher for those with more industrial sites (65% for 76-99 sites) compared to those with fewer sites (31% for 11-25 sites).
- Although 97% of respondents are aware of industrial DevOps and acknowledged its potential benefits, 44% cited competing priorities as the top challenge to adoption, followed by a lack of interest from management (39%).
