4 Ways to Accelerate IT with DevOps

Source – blogs.perficient.com

In our technology journey in 2017, we’ve covered DevOps numerous times and for good measure. Research firm IDC predicts that nearly 70% of Global Fortune 500 organizations will have implemented the development philosophy by the end of the year.

There’s still confusion about what exactly DevOps is. To us, DevOps should not be thought of as a solution, but rather a series of progressions that seeks to make the entire software development, IT operations, and business process easier through the adoption of appropriate tools, technologies, and staffing. Likewise, there also isn’t such a thing as a “DevOps Tool” but rather a collection of solutions that enhance the software development process. In the industry, experts refer to this as a toolchain.

The question about DevOps still remains for many: How does DevOps accelerate IT? Even with continuous innovation, automation, and greater communication between team members, the importance of focusing on business outcomes is still center stage. The following are some considerations we offer our customers when pushing the DevOps framework:

• Financial savings and efficiency: Automation is a key component of DevOps, particularly for assessing elements like code quality, adopting automation, and the management of large scale assets including data centers and servers. All of these combined together mean greater efficiency and fewer needed resources, allowing organizations to run leaner and faster. Many organizations have even seen more code deploys and greater employee productivity compared to before.
• Employee collaboration: DevOps breaks down the barrier between business units. While harrowing at first, the increased mentorship and sharing of ideas among peers leads to better products and understanding of business value. We’ll explore how culture can be properly created in the next section.
• Digital transformation commitment: Digital transformation is atop the CIO’s agenda more than ever, according to The Wall Street Journal and Nigel Warwick at research firm Forrester. Warwick specifically sees teams embracing the agility brought about by DevOps to help organizations become more aligned. Embracing digital transformation also aligns with an increased interest in integration, led by the adoption of APIs, microservices, and virtualization services.
• Improved visibility: Finally, DevOps gives organizational leaders the visibility to share information about environments, processes, and status updates in new ways. Many DevOps solutions unite operational processes on a single pane of glass that allows for streamlined communications, eliminating the need for emailing spreadsheets and presentations.