Digital First has been a strategy adopted by over 89% of organizations and that vision is expected to drive the digital transformation market to grow at a rate of 23% to $3.3 trillion by 2025. The global spending on digital transformation (DT) is estimated to exceed $1.78 trillion in 2022, accounting for 40% of all technology spending.
The data presented above is amazing! However, it’s also essential to note that 70% of DT projects fail, and by 2023, 50% of companies will lose their market share if they fail to invest/succeed in DT due to the following:
- Company Culture: With distributed structures and competing teams, there is a cultural shift that needs a buy-in from everyone in the organization to nurture DT.
- Delays in Feature Development: Complex architectures & legacy systems present difficulties in DT evolution stalling feature development.
- Impossible Agile Delivery Models: Organizations are under pressure, driven by many external factors like digital disruption causing agile delivery models impossible to execute.
- Not Enough Collaboration: Goals of the project are ambiguous resulting in poor collaboration.
- Poor Security Models: Fast evolution of new-age technologies makes it tough to keep pace with. Improper security leads to unsuccessful DT bringing uncertainty & instability.
- Scalability Issues: Sprawling is a significant source of complexity making it challenging to adapt quickly.
DevOps: The Benefits
Benefit 1: Technical
- Continuous software delivery
- Less complexity
- Faster resolution
Benefit 2: Cultural
- Happier and more productive teams
- Higher employee engagement
- Greater professional development opportunities
Benefit 3: Business
- Faster delivery of features
- More stable operating environments
- Improved communication and collaboration
- More time to innovate
DevOps Innovation will Continue
The majority of the concerns listed above can be resolved with a solid DevOps strategy. The benefits of a DevOps approach include continuous improvement, agility, and a shorter time to value.
Here are the top 5 advantages of DevOps that help DT projects be successful:
- DevOps fosters a collaborative atmosphere in which various teams collaborate to achieve common organizational goals. This means that your organization’s teams will not be segregated and will not strive for department-specific objectives.
- DevOps promotes collaboration by bridging the gap between Dev/Ops/QA teams and encouraging them to work together toward a common goal: increasing value for your company and customers.
- The faster you release, the more quickly your business value is recognized. The length of time it takes to test a product is determined by the availability of a testing environment.
- Through automated testing and integration, DevOps accelerates the delivery of software features and adjustments. DevOps forces your developers to monitor the product for any software updates or bugs throughout its full life cycle. This cuts down on the time it takes to track down, locate, and repair defects, allowing you to get to market faster.
- DevOps is a software development process that produces things quickly. As a result, such quick software delivery frees up part of the developers’ time, allowing them to experiment with new features or improve the effectiveness of existing ones. Developers can test the feasibility of such concepts by doing a proof of concept and progressing based on the findings with minimal disruption to the current project.
By allowing teams to learn more and better understand client expectations, DevOps fosters innovation. Feedback loops are an essential part of any DevOps implementation. Feedback loops enable end users—typically customers—to watch the progress of the application build at various stages and suggest any needed improvements in most scenarios of corporate software development.
DevOps speeds up software delivery, which has a direct and positive impact on customer satisfaction. DevOps also allows for lower-cost end products because it streamlines several components of the workflow.
When it comes to balancing capacity as a result of demand changes, DevOps methods allow a company to remain adaptable. It enables them to better understand how customers use the goods and their overall preferences so that they can continue to provide features that are valuable to them.
It also allows for the management of features and requirements for several apps running on different platforms. DevOps adoption also improves the way change management is handled, ensuring that the current process is not slowed or disrupted. It also aids IT leaders in resolving the problems that siloed teams might cause.
DevSecOps adds security as a separate component to DevOps’ essential development and operations components. DevSecOps adheres to the principle of continuous iterative improvements, which simplifies the entire security management process. It also speeds up the recovery process in the event of a security breach. Other benefits of using DevSecOps include reduced vulnerabilities and insecure defaults, improved code coverage, and the invigoration of secure design patterns in the process.
Though DevOps supports DT by breaking down silos and paving the way for constant innovation and quick experimentation, it must be handled right because each organization has its own working methods.
Here are a few pointers to help you get the most out of DevOps for DT:
The majority of DevOps efforts concentrate on tooling. Instead, use a DevOps culture that stresses people, metrics, and collaborative procedures to break down barriers. Leaders can assist by creating clear ownership, defining well-defined success criteria and indicators connected to customer outcomes.
The biggest DT pitfall is proliferating the silo culture of IT under the veil of DevOps. Historically, each team adopted its own set of tools, processes, frameworks, and vocabulary and didn’t bother if they are aligned with other teams or practices. That results in bottlenecks, confusion, and delays.
In a DevOps setting, using microservices is a great concept. DevOps best practice dictates that microservice applications be based on modular code. It improves the elasticity of your applications, allowing them to respond more quickly to changing workloads. That’s how it’ll help you save a millions of dollars on your infrastructure.
Open-source tools and platforms are being rapidly brought to the DevOps market; many companies are mushrooming with tools for DT due to the hype. Organizations need to do a real good competitive analysis on tools & platforms before adopting any of them.
Companies are starting to us MLOps to deploy ml algorithms faster and gain better insights. Though analytics-based solutions are good, just don’t go deploying for the sake of it. The behavior of ML cannot be through logical thinking, rather through analytical observation and experimentation.
My Recommendations
The technological landscape is changing rapidly, and DT is expanding frontiers all over the world. DevOps promotes customer and employee satisfaction while minimizing product development costs by speeding up development time and reducing waste.
Regardless of what the future holds for labor and businesses, DevOps will continue to evolve and pivot. Businesses will have to deploy breakthrough technology and push their boundaries. At the end of the day, change is the only constant, and the sooner you adapt/adopt, the better.