Kong Inc, a next-generation API and service lifecycle management platform, releases the findings of new research, which shows that a large percentage of companies in the US have a shocking three-year window of survival if they fail at digital transformation. According to the report, nearly 40 percent of technology leaders at public companies expect companies to go under or be acquired by 2023 if they lag behind.

The survey of 200 technology leaders at large U.S. companies, with respondents equally divided between publicly traded and privately held companies, benchmarks the use of modern software architectures to enable business agility and compares how they are being used at the two types of organizations.

There is no denying that technology leaders are at the frontline of a revolution in how software is created, facing immense pressure to future-proof their organizations' infrastructure, so that it can support the technologies, applications and business models of the future. The overwhelming majority of these professionals (89 percent) think the failure to adopt microservices will hurt the company's ability to compete. Likewise, three quarters of them expect serious professional ramifications—being fired, losing out on a promotion or missing out on a bonus—for failed modernization initiatives (e.g., cloud, microservices, and adopting new technologies).

The vast majority of companies (84 percent) are already using microservices, while 30 percent of the public company has transitioned entirely into distributed architectures, including microservices and serverless, which is slightly more than the privately held companies (28 percent). Notably, 43 percent of organizations with between 3,000 to 4,999 employees are using entirely distributed architectures.

The main reasons (beyond cost) that drives enterprises to transition to microservices is increased security(56 percent), increased speed of development(55 percent),

The shift to microservices is inevitable and already underway among most companies.

integrated new tech faster(53 percent), and increase infrastructure flexibility(53 percent).

Of companies with over 3,000 employees that uses, or plans to use microservices, 40 percent runs 100 or more microservices. 13 percent of companies surveyed are running 500 or more microservices, with public companies (14 percent) edging out private companies (11 percent).

With the diversity of applications running across heterogeneous environments, it comes as no surprise that more than 40 percent of respondents report having challenges with securing, scaling and/or ensuring performance for their APIs. Nearly all (90 percent) technology leaders agree that a major challenge is having a way to connect applications and services, while securing data in motion and ensuring optimum performance at massive scale.

When asked about specific challenges in using microservice-based applications, the top reasons cited include:
• Security issues (36 percent overall, 40 percent public, 32 percent private)
• Difficulty integrating existing monoliths with microservices (32 percent overall, 37 percent public, 26 percent private)
• Updating API documentation (31 percent overall, 28 percent public, 33 percent private)
• Complexity of managing services across platforms (31 percent overall, 32 percent public, 29 percent private)

Explaining about the innovations, Augusto Marietti, Co-Founder & CEO, Kong, asserts, “U.S. companies are facing a do or die moment when it comes to digital innovation, and most have a few short years to get it right before they fall too far behind to remain viable,” He further adds, “The shift to microservices is inevitable and already underway among most companies. But technology leaders are waking up to the fact that they need tools that make it easier to manage and secure distributed applications across old and new software architectures and platforms so they can focus on more strategic initiatives.”