Transformation at the Pace of DevOps

Source:-cio.com
DevOps continues to redefine application development and delivery, and accelerate business innovation.

As companies continue to work through their Digital Transformation, CIOs are often scrambling to stay out ahead. They find embracing DevOps is a critical step. Expediting application delivery throughout the enterprise with DevOps is critical to helping an enterprise successfully work through its Digital Transformation and remain competitive in today’s rapidly evolving business and technology climate.

Orchestrating continuous delivery is a relatively new way of thinking about and delivering business applications across the enterprise. It focuses on continuous improvement, continuous integration, and continuous delivery. In this new environment, release control and automating deployment are critical to ensure smooth delivery and provide a basis for governance.

Now the challenge for CIOs is how to smoothly cross that bridge from the current way to the new. The modern enterprise is a truly dynamic environment; and not all these changes are happening at the same pace. CIOs need a way to orchestrate these myriad changes. That’s where release control and deployment automation come in to play. They help ease the transition to continuous delivery; and work through the Digital Transformation one release at a time. This is the new normal of IT.

Continuous Delivery in the Enterprise

Business needs to innovate, not only to thrive but also simply survive in this dynamic climate. IT must work with business to progress through the Digital Transformation, but also do it faster and with lower operational risk. Conducting IT at the speed of business means automation must come into play. Automating continuous delivery efforts can expedite the availability of high-performance applications, but that automation must be done efficiently and effectively to avoid simply accelerating errors.

Successfully automating continuous delivery efforts means standardizing release and deployment processes. Adopting these essential best practices can help advance DevOps practice, truly align it with business goals and objectives, and continue to advance the Digital Transformation. These transformative process innovations can ensure agile release management practices that deliver high-quality applications at the speed at which business requires.

There are solutions available to support release control, deployment automation, and continuous delivery efforts; and those solutions meet stringent requirements. They must be flexible enough to work across multiple application development frameworks, platforms, and methodologies. And they must also be capable enough to:

• Provide audit compliant insight—visibility into the entire continuous delivery pipeline
• Help DevOps teams plan, track, and control all stages of the release lifecycle (including deployment and process governance)
• Support release coordination across geographically dispersed teams
• Enable automation for everything from mainframe to the cloud
• Standardize and automate deployment to reduce risk and duration
• Seamlessly deploy and maintain applications across heterogeneous, distributed physical, virtual, and cloud environments

Deliver Continuous Innovation

IT needs to fully understand business goals and objectives, and what it takes to deliver on those goals. DevOps and continuous delivery need to work within that context. Continuous delivery can help transform the business and deliver what the business needs; not at the speed of IT, but at the speed of business. Speed and quality are not mutually exclusive, they just require precise orchestration.