Why CDEs Should Be on IT Leaders' Agendas: Insights from the New Gartner Market Guide
Eight years ago, we set out to make Cloud Development Environments (CDEs) practical for organizations across industries. Today, Coder is used by some of the largest U.S. investment banks, intelligence agencies, and global SaaS providers, cutting onboarding times, protecting code from theft, and improving collaboration.
Now, Gartner® has released a definitive market overview on the role of CDEs and their future. The 2024 Market Guide for Cloud Development Environments explains what CDEs are, why they’re growing in popularity, and why IT leaders should take notice.
Gartner notes: “AI engineering and cloud-native development workflow complexity make it hard to improve developer productivity, streamline the onboarding experience and secure the software supply chain. Software engineering leaders can use cloud development environments to address these challenges for their teams.”
We agree. Developers do their best work when they’re enjoying their coding experience, using familiar tools without friction. A centralized development environment makes collaboration easier and keeps code secure.
The CDE Market Today
Gartner states that the CDE market is still in its early stages, having penetrated less than 5% of its potential target audience. They estimate that it may take another five to 10 years to reach mainstream use.
As with any major technology shift, adoption takes time—but momentum is building. According to a Gartner Peer Community Survey, 59% of respondents plan to phase out local workstations in favor of CDEs, while 12% say they have already done it. An industry-level analysis of the same survey shows that the percentages are higher in specific verticals — 67% in banking, finance and insurance, 60% in healthcare, 67% in retail, 63% in manufacturing and 70% in professional services plan to adopt CDEs.
Gartner identified three primary value drivers for adopting CDEs: productivity, security and support for multiple personas.
Productivity
Gartner cites productivity improvements as “the biggest driving factor for the adoption of CDEs.” Gartner’s Software Engineering Survey for 2024 revealed that 36% of software engineering leaders have seen CDEs increase developer productivity in their organizations.
CDEs reduce time spent on setup, onboarding, and switching between development environments. —long enough for a developer to forget why they were hired in the first place. A configured CDE, on the other hand, gets them coding in minutes.
For leadership, this is a priority. Less time wasted on non-coding tasks leaves more focus time for developers to create the new apps and services that drive business growth. Developers spend more time on work they enjoy, improving retention.
Security
Securing code is a top concern for C-level executives, who worry about IP theft and compliance violations. CDEs improve security by centralizing control, enforcing policies without adding extra work for developers. IT teams can enforce consistent security policies, while developers access vetted tools, reducing shadow IT and unapproved open-source software usage.
Security is already a deciding factor for some teams. According to the State of Development Environments 2025 report, security and compliance concerns are among the biggest challenges administrators face, with 25% citing them as a primary obstacle. Additionally, approval bottlenecks—often tied to security considerations—were a major challenge for both developers (21%) and administrators (24%), highlighting the need for environments that balance security with accessibility.
Support for multiple personas
CDEs provide a central repository for tools and resources, enabling multiple personas to securely collaborate and share data. Since the environments are centralized, developers get remote access to specialized hardware (e.g., GPUs, sensors, etc.) in a cost-effective manner, and minimize the need for the organization to purchase laptops with high-end specifications. Platform Engineering teams can use CDEs to easily manage software dependencies, and data scientists can access large datasets and computing power for training ML models.
The road ahead
CDEs are still gaining traction, but organizations are seeing their value now. They’re removing the friction from developers’ experience, strengthening security, and a broader range of users across teams.
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Gartner, Market Guide for Cloud Development Environments, Manjunath Bhat, Thomas Murphy, 18 September 2024
GARTNER is a registered trademark and service mark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and is used herein with permission. All rights reserved.This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Coder.
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