DevOps - The Engine of Digital Transformation

It's a given that continuous integration and continuous delivery of seamless applications and services requires businesses to use the latest tools and technologies. For this, software plays a vital role, seeing the fact that it is what really fuels a company’s productivity and innovation.

Digital methodologies are now closing the gap between development and IT operations teams. Adoption of DevOps is one such popular trend today with the help of which business leaders are being able to release new software more frequently. 

Agile and DevOps can entirely transform your organizational culture, allowing you to fulfil growing customer demands in the market. No doubt, DevOps plays a humongous role in business’s digital transformation with its agile experimentation, cultural change, consistent improvements and getting rid of silos.

In this post, we are going to see how DevOps acts like an engine of Digital Transformation for organizations:

Bringing much-needed Cultural Change

Unnecessary processes, traditional work methodologies and lack of will to transform for years and years are a few culprits that can halt your digital transformation journey. DevOps aims to bring a cultural change to this mindset, encouraging businesses to break their old-school mindset and embrace newer technologies. 

People, Process and Technology

DevOps culture revolves around people, processes and technology, all of these strategized to meet crucial business goals. It helps organizations with continuous integration and continuous delivery, so customers get new products faster. 

DevOps also aims to discard unnecessary tools and processes, whilst focusing on productivity and newer digital innovations. Such approach prevents waste of people and resources on lesser important business goals, so companies can target their most critical goals.

DevOps integrates automation into your release processes, thereby making it easier to estimate software change, if any. Without DevOps, the discharge method and last-minute changes would be really time-consuming and nerve-wrecking. Not just that, DevOps approach also never fails to deliver quality products and services.

Consistent Digital Initiatives

DevOps fuels your digital transformation journey, as it encourages organizations to consistently take on digital initiatives. It helps organizations recognize systems and models that will boost their efficiency and performance altogether in terms of digital division. This in turn, will allow them to get a competitive edge over the rivals in the market.

DevOps culture will take you out from following same-old work methods, and prepare you for a digital-ready organization where every team can bring about cultural change. It is not only about creating modern pipelines; rather DevOps will offer you new standards and frameworks to utilize, from a cultural point of view.

Self-steering towards success

DevOps will solidify businesses’ IT integrity and make them more flexible, secure, on-demand and insightful. 

It allows organizations to make dynamic changes to their fundamental IT infrastructure, which in turn makes it easier to make key changes to business-critical applications and services as well. Such approach not only enhances collaborations between development and IT operations teams, but also exceptionally boosts their productivity. 

In your digital transformation journey, DevOps will make sure all the software changes in development and deployment systems are created from code in version control. This way, business teams can easily trace back to version control and won’t need to indulge into uncertain manual set up.

DevOps together with other digital monitoring and analytics tools can really do wonders to your organization. These modern tools allow businesses to derive invaluable insights from IT systems, helping them reduce their MTTR (Mean Time to Recovery). Teams will be able to target important production tasks, react faster to changing business needs and self-steer towards promising success.

Automation is Key

DevOps prioritizes automation and agility. To get a competitive edge over the rivals, one needs to innovate faster and efficiently. And for that, businesses need to automate their workflows in order to reduce repetitive and redundant manual tasks. 

DevOps paves the way to automate IT provisioning as well as pipeline for continuous integration and continuous delivery straight from the repository. It also helps automating testing of applications and their deployment to a great extent. 

But before businesses take the step towards automation, they must keep all their processes and IT culture in mind and implement automation carefully. Of course, there will be risks involved, but you cannot really transform digitally with lack of risk appetite.

Integrated Pipelines

DevOps together with digital transformation can make organizations greatly agile. It will help you inculcate newer technologies and platforms into your architecture such as cloud, micro-services, containerization and so on. All of these latest strategies aim to modernize your applications and services to make them flexible, secure and reliable. 

Best method of increasing agility is to set up integrated delivery pipelines. Throughout the development process, CI (continuous integration) and CD (continuous delivery) are key stages to work faster. It allows developers to frequently deliver code changes and keep up with the business goals and growing customer needs.

Security is a Must

It is an absolute bummer for businesses to go through security issues and cyberattacks at a critical point in their success journey. Often, business leaders tend to accelerate and automate the development lifecycle to deliver products faster, whilst neglecting the security aspects. 

But, it is extremely important to keep security checks  in mind as your business pipelines are exposed to cybersecurity risks at all times. DevOps security practices such as thorough scanning and automated security checks ensure your software is secure before it is deployed to the customers. 

Not just that, it also trains developers to write codes that are more secure and reliable. With such an approach, teams will be able to deploy perfect products based on feedback, instead of wasting time on cycles only after a security issue occurs.

DevOps considers Experimentation

Innovation and digital transformation can only come from experimentation. Businesses with lack of risk appetite and uncertainty to experiment will never truly explore the benefits of digital transformation. 

DevOps culture will act as a driving engine to help you get to your digital transformation goal. It will motivate you to experiment with your workflows, so you can consistently learn, take feedback and make improvements to deliver value to your customers.

Consider continuous learning and experimentation as the ground upon which your company’s digital change will truly evolve.

Continuous Transformation

Digital transformation is driven by that dire need to evolve, acquire and move faster than the competition. Businesses are continuously looking for new ways to improve their architectures and applications with modern tools. 

This is exactly what DevOps practices do.

DevOps culture inspires you to create a detailed scale to continuously make changes. Platforms like containerization, cloud and micro services can be quite complex. Thus, the flow between your development and operations need to be well-organized and seamless, or else you might face undesirable glitches. DevOps culture will allow such transformation with much flexibility and agility.

With DevOps, companies will be able to:

• Get faster feedback from customers via digital interactions and interpret them quickly 
• Make changes based on the gathered feedback to enhance applications and services
• Automate release method to deliver code faster and more frequently

In Conclusion:

DevOps is a culture in itself and it is fairly easy to adopt. 

And know that, taking on your digital transformation journey without embracing DevOps is next to impossible. It is extremely crucial for companies to learn and adopt the best practices of DevOps across their entire pipelines, so as to reap the maximum benefits out of DevOps and to achieve your digital goals.