Survey of 200 U.S. executives on the emergence of Industrial DevOps reveals half of all downtime is caused by programming mistakes
Copia Automation, empowering companies to gain end-to-end visibility and control of their operational technology, released its first annual State of Industrial DevOps Report today, the first survey of its kind on the application of information technology (IT) DevOps principles and practices to the industrial sector. The report reveals that industrial coding errors cause manufacturing shutdowns lasting 30 hours on average, costing $4.2M per hour and $126M 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).
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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, with this figure rising to 20X (77 hours per month) in retail and material handling.
- 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%).
The survey highlights significant vulnerabilities in operational technology (OT) — the software and hardware that control industrial equipment. A possible cause for these is ad hoc fixes in industrial programming, with 79% of respondents saying they are commonplace.
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.
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“The cost of downtime minimizes or eliminates the margin between profitability and failure for manufacturers,” said Copia Co-founder and CEO Adam Gluck. “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. Industrial DevOps delivers the technology and the process change to do this.”
The report examines the adoption of Industrial DevOps, which applies IT DevOps principles and practices (e.g., visibility, automation, validation, and quality control) to OT within industrial environments and operations. This specialized approach for complex cyber-physical systems has been found to facilitate faster production cycles, higher quality products, and reduced operational costs.
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