One of the biggest headaches IT leaders face today is managing cross-functional teams to develop and deploy high-quality software faster. Not only does their work have to be continuous to stay productive, but there’s the need to save the business money, time and improve end user and customer satisfaction while fixing a seemingly endless parade of bugs.
Without a robust DevOps process in place that benefits the entire organization, IT management and tech leaders often feel like they are chasing the impossible.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a set of practices that help you plan how both development (Dev) and operations (Ops) teams can work cohesively to deliver your company’s products and services, meet customer needs and stay ahead of your competitors. In short, it is a set of tools that leverages people, processes and technology to enable safer, faster handling of any IT software delivery initiative.
Yet, according to Gartner, as of the beginning of 2022, 75% of DevOps initiatives have not met these expectations because of inefficient collaboration, lack of buy-in from employees, trying to do too much too quickly and unrealistic expectations. For a methodology that is so critical to businesses today, it’s still surrounded by uncertainty and doubt. Let’s look at how you can make DevOps work for you and why it’s so important that you do so.
Addressing Bugs
Because detecting and addressing software bugs is a major priority of any IT department, disruptions need to be handled quickly and efficiently. This can only be done through immediate action and a tried-and-testing workflow in which all departments involved can act fast. The beauty of DevOps is that the process can be continuous rather than reactive and thus improve the quality of your software when deploying new features, as DevOps allows you to make changes rapidly.
Without DevOps, productivity is slowed or even brought to a halt which leads to an often-damaging customer experience.
Improving Customer Satisfaction
A significant benefit of adopting DevOps practices is that it lowers the failure rate of new features while improving recovery time. The continuous deployment, testing and feedback loops ensure faster service delivery and happier customers. The development team can focus on creating superior products by automating the software pipeline while the operations team can improve business delivery.
Faster delivery of your products and services should not be a pipe dream. Those who understand and implement DevOps should feel confident they can stay ahead of the competition.
Improving the Security of Your Software
DevSecOps builds on the DevOps pipeline to integrate security from the very beginning of the development cycle rather than at the deployment stage when flaws and vulnerabilities are more difficult and costlier to fix. Combining development, security and operations across your products and services will improve quality, security and your ability to meet client expectations. Building security into your pipeline seamlessly means bugs and other issues can be addressed more easily and remain almost unnoticed to the end users.
DevOps and DevSecOps make this possible so that outdated security practices are not integrated into your software and don’t interfere with customer demand. So, if increasing customer satisfaction and positively impacting your bottom line by delivering high-quality, secure and effective software is on your business priority list, then implementing a DevOps process can not only save IT headaches but deliver better business outcomes.
