Introduction
In today’s ultra-competitive world, it has become imperative for almost every organization to adopt the DevOps culture if they want to keep up with the drastic pace of app and platform improvements to stay competitive and cybersecure in 2022 and beyond.
DevOps continues to add its value by combining the merits of both software development and IT operations to deliver novel applications faster and with greater strength and quality than in the past. The essence of an effective DevOps strategy is creating shared collaboration and ownership across software development and IT operations for code produced and apps launched.
In today’s modern world, every business enterprise is competing against shorter time-to-market schedules than ever. Moreover, there is a need for real-time responses to resist the threat of cyberattacks, targeting the core executables of cybersecurity monitoring platforms and tools. There is an additional responsibility and compulsion on IT platforms to deliver real-time responses to threats. The best way to be more competitive in any market is not only to be smarter than your competitors but also to be swifter than them in grabbing new customer opportunities. Given the ever-changing nature of today’s markets, there’s no time to waste in outsmarting the competitors when it comes to creating customer-facing apps that help prospects and customers better. DevOps delivers powerful competitive strength to any business enterprise that adopts it and makes it a central part of its DNA. A standard DevOps team in a $500M+ organization has over 200 simultaneous projects in progress, with more than 70% of them devoted to securing and improving customer experiences.
Agility and quality have never been so crucial to the core DevOps DNA of business enterprises as they are in today’s modern world. Organizations desirous of achieving agility and quality productivity have to start with a clear strategy for automating the six areas of DevOps, which usually begin with ‘Build and Test’ on the DevOps side. On the IT Operations side, the greatest potential for automation today is demonstrated by Deployment, Release, Operations and Monitoring.
Why Every Organization Needs a Salesforce DevOps Strategy
#1: Boosts Productivity Due to Systematized Business Processes
The traditional method of waterfall model of software development involved delivering of the software from one team to another. This augmented the possibility of errors and slowed down the development process. The supreme benefit of DevOps is that the collaboration among numerous teams unifies the business processes, leading to an enhancement in productivity. Real-time changes to the code can be made, and issues and opportunities can be identified at an early stage. The rapid installation of changes leads to low application downtime, while augmenting the productivity of all stakeholders involved in the development process. It promotes close and speedy working, establishing efficiency in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC).
#2: Promotes Innovation & Facilitates Digital Restructuring of Organizations
DevOps leads to integrating of processes, more efficient releases, and ensures quality builds. With the deployment phases being more flexible, the teams get more rest, and there is massive opportunity to establish an innovative approach to solve issues. DevOps facilitates innovation and creativity among teams, leading to happier and engaged workforce, which ultimately becomes more productive. The crucial aspects of the DevOps model – automated deployments and standardized production environments – make deployments predictable and free people from mundane repetitive tasks, thereby enabling them do more creative things.
DevOps model can also enhance customer loyalty and Lifetime Customer Value (LCV) for an organization, while providing it an opportunity to digitally restructure themselves. What’s required is a model that enables them to provide an ultimate customer experience, automate customer transactions, and support automation everywhere. DevOps enables organizations to innovate with greater speed, compared to their competitors, by enabling the agility, customer-focus, and pragmatic insights essential to realizing data-driven business outcomes.
#3: Augments Collaboration Resulting in Greater Employee Satisfaction
A smooth and more transparent business process that encourages collaboration among employees directly contributes to a happier workplace. The better the communication and collaboration of the team, the higher is their efficacy and work satisfaction. Nurturing a positive work environment boosts employee morale. Each employee is equally responsible for contributing to the continuous delivery chain, which eventually bolsters the complete team. This establishes a culture of trust in the team, where every individual is motivated, leading to greater employee satisfaction and higher productivity. It also meets the quality expectations, which are delivered in a timely manner and increases business growth.
Greater collaboration across Development, IT Operations, Finance, Sales and Executive Management reduces the gaps in financial reporting, especially when it involves development of new apps. DevOps enhances communication throughout the organization, averting costly errors when applications are initially being created or patched. Successful implementation of DevOps strategy is a far-reaching phenomenon involving the entire organization. It not only requires the engagement of all stakeholders but also the acceptance of a DevOps culture, and welcoming the lean and agile principles. Talented DevOps engineers can help the organization achieve success swifter.
#4: Improves Customer Experience & Consumer Satisfaction
When the development is better and happens at a rapid pace, customer satisfaction
automatically enhances. DevOps team can better serve customers and integrate speedy customer feedback in the potential product iterations, leading to enriched customer satisfaction. DevOps enables product teams to explore more opportunities to shine in every sphere of customer experience, further kindling new product ideas and completely new businesses that allow natural revenue growth. It facilitates engineering, manufacturing, sales and marketing to share a single, unified customer view. DevOps leads to enhanced speed and efficacy in responding to customer needs, both proactively and reactively. A satisfied and committed customer base directly translates into higher ROI and better business gains.
#5: Saves Millions Every Year Via Scale & Transparency
DevOps can bring greater scale, accountability, and visibility to IT Operations, saving millions of dollars every year in unnecessary downtime expenses. The consistency DevOps delivers to the SDLC reduces the necessity for code changes to impact production. The IT Process Institute Visible Ops Handbook mentions that approximately 80% of unplanned production downtime was due to poorly planned changes to production systems of IT operations. Gartner states that people and process issues contribute up to 80% of downtime, impacting mission-critical services. IDC’s ‘DevOps and the Cost of Downtime: Fortune 1000 Best Practice Metrics Quantified Study,’ mentions that the average hourly cost of failure of a vital application is between $500,000 and $1 million, while the cost of random application downtime for a usual Fortune 1000 company was up to $1.25 billion in lost sales and productivity.[ Louis Columbus, “10 Reasons Why Every Enterprise Needs a DevOps Strategy in 2021,” https://www.forbes.com/sites/louiscolumbus/2021/02/21/10-reasons-why-everyenterprise-
needs-a-devops-strategy-in-2021/?sh=3fb6d6af4f9c, Feb 21, 2021.
] Thus, adoption of DevOps practices can save an organization billions of dollars every year.
Conclusion
Embracing DevOps practices showers numerous benefits to different stakeholders within the organization, including the development team, IT operations team, and the shareholders. Shareholders expect that the time and efforts invested in implementing DevOps within their organization should bring them quantifiable business outcomes.
The quantifiable outcomes obtained by embracing DevOps practices into the business arena serve as a driving force that strengthens the idea of a DevOps environment. DevOps is all about a smooth collaboration between the Development and the Operations teams. It primarily helps in creating an extremely active development environment that works concurrently with the business requirements. A research study by Coleman Parkes shows that 81% of business executives believe that Agile and DevOps are vital to digital transformation of organizations and 4 out of 5 organizations currently employ these practices to some extent.[ Dr. Vinati Kamani, “8 Benefits of Adopting a DevOps Strategy in 2020,” https://arkenea.com/blog/benefits-of-devops/. ]
