Global businesses are in the midst of an enormous digital transformation wave. As we step into the realm of industry 4.0, exponential technologies are becoming a fundamental segment of traditional business settings.
Despite having access to transformative technologies, however, many organizations fail to embrace disruption and harness their potential to stay ahead of the curve. Much of this stems from their inability to foster a collaborative environment wherein myriad teams and operating IT systems work in unison to achieve their goals. Without a strong foundation of infrastructure automation and well-chosen team collaborations, embarking on the digital transformation journey is difficult. And to do that, adopting a DevOps mindset is necessary. In essence, organizations need to incorporate DevOps practices to transform, compete and protect their new value pools without sacrificing quality, stability and productivity.
Digital Transformation and DevOps
DevOps helps enterprises succeed with digital transformation by triggering a paradigm shift in the cultural mindset of the business, breaking down silos and driving continuous change and rapid experimentation.
There are multiple benefits of merging DevOps with a digital transformation strategy. First, this methodology breaks down the silos between IT and business operations, thereby ensuring consistent levels of productivity, efficiency and service delivery. This has a direct impact on companies’ time-to-market. Second, bug fixes are much easier due to the automation of toolchains. Third, the automation that DevOps introduces improves developer/IT productivity as they can focus more on innovation rather than being caught in a cycle of bug-fixing and firefighting.
Despite DevOps’ contribution to digital transformation, its adoption in many industries is still slow due mainly to scarcity of skills and the right toolset. Complete automation remains elusive. Additionally, patchy adoption has given rise to a two-paced overall technology environment—one part is fully integrated with DevOps and the other part is users still mulling over the “how” of tightly integrating it in the overall process.
Advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning could resolve these issues. They can alleviate operational complexities in DevOps to help organizations transform at a faster pace. The following are some of the benefits offered by these technologies.
Better Automation
The need to rely on manual processes can be reduced with AI- and ML-based technologies, which has an enormous impact on data analysis. Organizations can use powerful AI data mapping techniques to automate data transformation processes with ease and speed. They can make use of the predictive ability to accelerate the process, increasing accuracy by leaps and bounds. This transformed data can be easily integrated using another solution AI integration, and so it becomes easier for users to work on data for extracting business intelligence and streamlining decision-making. This entire process takes only a few minutes to complete. Plus, since the need for manual intervention is curtailed, developers who previously were mired in handling transformation operations can move on to more strategic tasks such as governance, control and resource planning.
Better Security Through Intelligent Anomaly Detection
AI and ML-powered technologies, with their highly precise features, augment system security to deliver better performance. With a centralized logging architecture, users can record and root out suspicious activity on the network. These technologies togehter with DevOps can help mitigate the impact of threats and hacker attacks to help companies drive their digital transformation initiatives with precision.
Better Team Collaboration
In any organization, two teams function in parallel: the developer team, which has the responsibility to code fast, and the operations team, which ensures minimal disruption. While maintaining this balance can be difficult, transformative technologies such as AI and ML can help these two teams work in unison, improving collaboration by helping them have a single, unified view into system issues across the business ecosystem.
Better Customer Experience
AI-based technologies can have a direct impact on organizational productivity and performance. They can develop and launch their products faster (keeping customer expectations in mind) with lower TCO. Plus, DevOps-inspired service teams are able to provide a higher level of service, resulting in more satisfied customers
AI-powered technologies are critical to kickstart DevOps performance and ultimately drive digital transformation initiatives. Infusion of AI not only improves enabling faster development and deployment cycles through automation, but also enables better collaboration and uncovers and remediates key issues, helping businesses unlock digital transformation value.
