Copia Automation has released its first annual State of Industrial DevOps Report, a new look at the application of industrial information technology (IT) DevOps principles and practices. The report reveals that 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).
Additional findings include:
- The most common causes of unplanned downtime are cybersecurity breaches (47 percent) followed by hardware malfunction (45 percent), coding/software issues (41 percent), human error (32 percent), and environmental disaster (25 percent).
- 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 percent for 76-99 sites) compared to those with fewer sites (31 percent for 11-25 sites).
- Although 97 percent of respondents are aware of Industrial DevOps and acknowledged its potential benefits, 44 percent cited competing priorities as the top challenge to adoption, followed by a lack of interest from management (39 percent).
- The survey highlights significant vulnerabilities in operational technology, with a possible cause for these being ad hoc fixes in industrial programming – with 79 percent 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, especially due to the thousands of devices managed by manufacturers that can make the cascading effect of unmonitored changes substantial.
The full report can be download here.