DevOps – The Digital Transformation

Is your organization in the midst of digital transformation?

DevOps is a combination of Development and Operations. It refers to several software development practices that make system development cycles more efficient by merging software development with IT operations.

DevOps has played an important role in digital transformation in the last few years – from identifying designs to introducing new revenue streams.

According to a survey from 2019, 63% of organizations revealed that their software releases were more frequent after embracing DevOps.

Digital transformation refers to the development of applications that can be renewed and revised at any moment as per the customer requirements and can be effectively implemented without disrupting the customer experience. Customer-focused applications are an important prospect for any organization to drive their business in the modern digital world. This is why companies around the globe are adopting DevOps.

DevOps offers a wide array of features that help implement digital transformation initiatives successfully and ensure that you get the best outcomes. The main takeaway is that DevOps involves collaboration between cross-functional teams that work in tandem and specifies key outcomes to meet the expected results. Digital transformation is mostly focused on increasing the quality and speed, ensuring that organizations can enjoy an adequate return on investment (ROI) on every technology utilized. DevOps ensures that this is done with the assistance of continuous development, testing, and integration in the application development.

DevOps In Digital Transformation

So, how exactly is DevOps a harbinger of digital transformation? Let’s find out.

1. Introduces Practices for Improvements

One of the most influential parts of DevOps in digital transformation is to promote a certain form of thinking: it empowers enterprises to review and grasp the systems and models intended to elevate their efficiency and operation in the area of digital division. This boosts their competitive position. Shifting from a conventional and hierarchical organization to the one that is digital-ready, where order and autonomy are equal, power is distributed, and everyone is allowed to contribute, is not a piece of cake. It requires a significant amount of behavioral change.

2. Unifies People, Process and Technology

DevOps empowers businesses to create and deploy new products to their clients faster, helping them grow and shape their digital initiatives accordingly. DevOps merges people, processes, and technology – consolidated to meet the business goals.

DevOps inhibits you from wasting tools and people. This is done by prioritizing stuff that must be done for digital innovations. This way, you can release wasted or hidden resources assigned on tasks with low priorities, thereby ensuring that the most critical and essential points are dealt with first.

DevOps enables you to meet client demands within deadlines. Without it, estimating software changes would be harder.

3. Breaks the Social Mindset

DevOps implementation involves recognizing an idea and assisting the organization with understanding it quickly without getting trapped between the heaps of jargon and technology. Often, enterprises fail to expand due to the existing corporate culture. They are fixated on the past – using the same old processes for developing, shipping, and running technological initiatives used in the past 20 or 30 years. DevOps serves as the killer of red tape, demonstrating a cultural mindset that aims to eliminate irrelevant processes.

4. Brings Agility to the Table

DevOps-powered collaboration brings up agility to the table. It helps to integrate, deliver, and deploy software continuously while keeping up with the required revisions.

The first strategy to get agility is to build integrated delivery pipelines. In a non-DevOps business scenario, constant requirement changes cause chaos due to the production pipelines – they lack adequate integration.

On the other hand, with DevOps, teams can leverage integrated production pipelines to address rollbacks or requirement changes and even perform automation. Planning boards have access to business and product owners to evaluate the dependency and priority of features. Cloud technologies assist with altering the infrastructure capabilities and track applications for rollbacks.

DevOps has standard communication practices – technologies, toolchains, processes, and language. Once there is uniformity, addressing new challenges is easy.

5. Adds to Product Reliability

In the traditional waterfall model, testing is used to ensure that the end-user receives the highest-quality product. If bugs are identified, organizations will be more receptive to extending timelines. However, this does not work for companies when they are working on digital transformation.

Businesses have to implement practices like source code repositories, standardized technology stacks, version control, and use standard practices for infrastructure changes. This adds to the standard development practices with limited variance, which ensures that the quality and reliability of the product remain intact.

6. Ensures Security

Along with excellent value and flexibility, DevOps ensures security and safety. For organizations looking for faster and value-added delivery, security remains a major concern. DevOps can ease their worries by incorporating security directly into DevOps processes and adopting the shift left approach.

Future of DevOps

With the rapidly evolving business dynamics and customer expectations, along with the rise of technological innovations, digital transformation is the way forward. DevOps is well-poised to play a pivotal role in it. Currently, nearly 90% of global organizations are effectively leveraging DevOps in their business processes. Those who are not using it are already contemplating shifting to it.

Do remember that DevOps is in no way a magic bullet. It will not address all of your software development issues. Still, it provides tremendous value to organizations by increasing engagement with clients and other critical business stakeholders. These tools and practices will assist companies in sustaining themselves in the volatile business environment.