Patching vulnerabilities can be daunting, especially if the information is confusing, and the process to deploy patches is long. There are going to be times where a zero day presents itself, and the vulnerability requires immediate action. Whether it’s a simple fix or not, the seriousness of some vulnerabilities can put organizations at risk. Deploying patches, especially for critical infrastructure, takes planning.

Take the 2021 State of DevOps Survey here. This year marks the 10-year anniversary of our industry-defining State of DevOps research. You’d think after 10 years that there wouldn’t be much more to say about DevOps, but practices and technologies continue to evolve, the best keep getting better, and we keep unearthing new topics to research.

I’ve got some exciting news! With the recent release of Puppet Comply 1.0.2, we’re providing the ability to assess Windows 2016 servers against DISA STIGs, required security standards for companies that do business with the U.S. Department of Defense. This new capability makes it drastically easier for organizations to assess and demonstrate compliance with DISA STIGs.

CIS (Center for Internet Security) is a non-profit organization that aims to develop a best practice in relation to cyber security. The CIS benchmarks have been adopted by many organizations as the standard against which to measure their systems.

The year 2020 upended life as we know it — yet amid worldwide shutdowns and cross-industry layoffs, the respondents to the 2020 State of DevOps survey reported an overall rise in salary levels compared to the past couple of years.

More and more, companies from small businesses to global enterprises are migrating or deploying workloads in public cloud environments. Typically, their goal is cost optimization, as public clouds can dramatically reduce on-premises infrastructure costs and corresponding maintenance labor costs. Instead of installing more servers, storage, and networking components in your own datacenter, public cloud environments allow you to deploy dynamic cloud resources, usually with a short to medium lifespan.

The winter release of Puppet Enterprise is now available. Puppet continues to build out its flagship product to help organizations scale DevOps initiatives, meet compliance requirements, and deliver on cloud and hybrid initiatives. With this release, we’ve focused on delivering key enhancements to help boost productivity, giving organizations the ability to automate faster and more securely at scale.

Security is essential. It’s top of mind for organizations of all sizes and it’s certainly a top priority for Puppet. The latest release of Puppet Enterprise 2021.0 now offers support for SAML 2.0 providing a more secure and efficient authentication path for our customers to access their Puppet environments, applications and tooling.

Our 2020 State of DevOps Report focuses on two areas that can help organizations scale their DevOps initiative: a platform approach to software delivery and applying DevOps principles to change management. We found that internal platform usage is widespread — 63 percent of respondents report their company has at least one self-service internal platform.