Key Findings from the 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report: Security, Performance Metrics, and Organizational Types

The 2022 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, based on a survey of 1,350 professionals (68% in development, engineering, or IT operations), emphasizes software supply‑chain security as a primary concern, noting that 2021 saw over 22 billion records exposed due to data breaches.

Security findings reveal that organizations using application‑level security scanning as part of their CI/CD pipeline are the most common practice (63% of respondents), while practices such as history preservation, build‑script signing, metadata signing, and two‑person review have the most room for improvement. The report also stresses that a high‑trust, low‑blame culture is the strongest predictor of adopting emerging security practices, outperforming purely technical factors by 1.6 times.

The report reaffirms the five “golden” DevOps performance metrics—deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to restore, change failure rate, and reliability—showing no change from previous years. Organizations scoring highest deliver multiple deployments per day, keep lead time under a week, restore services within a day, and maintain a change failure rate below 15%.

Cloud adoption continues to rise, with public‑cloud usage at 76% (up from 56% in 2021) and only 10.5% reporting no cloud use. Multi‑cloud users outperform single‑cloud users, achieving a 1.4 × increase in organizational performance.

Cluster analysis of the five metrics identifies four DevOps organization types: Startup (early‑stage, low reliability focus), Flow (high reliability, stability, and throughput), Slow (infrequent deployments but high success when they occur), and Inactive (still maintaining valuable services but no active development).

The report concludes with recommendations for high‑performing teams to focus on loosely coupled architecture, CI/CD, version control, and workplace flexibility, and provides links to download the full report, run a DevOps quick check, and access enterprise guides for implementing DORA practices.