How DevOps are Crucial for Indian Organizations

With the rising adoption of mobile devices by employees across all verticals, including BFSI, manufacturing, retail and services, the demand for agile solutions that enable access to content and applications on mobile platforms is increasing. Mobile devices are at the center of everything we do personally and professionally. In today's world these mobile apps are an important channel for global organizations as well as small and medium-sized businesses in interacting internally and externally with their customers. This growing trend of mobility is placing a large amount of pressure on IT organizations to push out better performing applications faster than ever before. Within various sectors a delay in delivering applications, or compromising on quality for speed, can make a significant difference between a large customer churn and increased average revenue per user (ARPU). Additionally the explosion of cloud and the increasing role of IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS in enterprise application development contribute to the changing role of the CIO. The CIO is now carrying out the role of a ‘broker' of technology services to the business with a particular focus on driving innovation. This results in most CIOs facing increasing pressure from the business to provide applications which are more vigorous, address customer experience requirements, in a faster and more cost effective way.

FACING THE CHALLENGES

Enterprises strive to continually innovate in order to deliver the best services to their customers. They are driven by market pressures to better develop and manage new software features to meet growing customer demands; however, the lack of collaboration between the development and IT operations team can impact an enterprises ability to respond quickly to market opportunities.

Another huge challenge a CIO faces in delivering to this mandate is congregating the traditionally defined lines between development and operations. The traditional segregation is quite often what contributes to shortcomings, slowness in app delivery, misalignment in business requirements and ultimately, resources related with running an efficient Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). Cloud infrastructure and virtualization is driving the requirement for a higher volume of app releases by business stakeholders, compelling CIOs to revise SDLC to enable rapid delivery. As a result, SDLC needs to be more proficient in order to drive better alliance between development and operations.

CIOs can help organizations achieve high competence with DevOps by bringing together the development and operations mindsets and organizing cross-trainings for both the teams to be well-versed in both the disciplines. With their vast experience, CIOs need to redesign IT policies with a focus on people process and to automate as much as possible. This collaboration starts with Ops and development aligning with the LOB at design stage, ensuring there is a focus on value and speed in development and runs through the SLDC with continuous delivery all the way into production where monitoring of the application is fed back into the SDLC to optimize future development.

DevOps originated with a focus on nonstop co-operation band delivery where development and operations teams work in sync with the single goal of swift delivery to production. According to a recent study conducted by CA Technologies, 85% of IT leaders expect DevOps methodology to drive greater investments in training for development and operational personnel to cater to the growing need of DevOps challenges, while 76% of IT leaders are likely to invest in new tools. With the proliferation of mobile devices and BYOD are compelling CIOs to adopt solutions which can be easily accessed on mobile platforms round the clock, with relevant contents and are of superior quality.

Automation is a key component, leading to quick and efficient delivery of the applications and making organizations agile. India being a leader in technology adoption and service provision should look at DevOps as a significant enabler in further driving Agile Development such as XP or KANBAN or similar methodologies. As with most process oriented concepts, DevOps also requires a mixture of qualitative and quantitative initiative such as social engagements and user enablements. A well implemented DevOps strategy will help CIOs drive faster output of applications by compressing rudimentary testing and creating significantly better quality applications. CA Technologies enables the development function to be more business centric, to provide applications which allow businesses to drive innovation and competitive differentiation. With CA Lisa CIOs can drastically reduce software testing environment constraints, infrastructure costs and software release cycle times. Service Virtualization, Automated Test and Continuous Delivery assists CIO's to achieve the goals of DevOps. Continuous Application Delivery with CA LISA Release Automation (formerly Nolio) optimizes and automates the manual process of configuration, deployment and releases across the software life cycle, from design to production environments.

Disruptive trends challenge IT organizations with the need to improve the practices around application development, quality testing and release management also grows. Supporting agile development, continuous delivery, continuous validation, and continuous monitoring will assist CIOs to rapidly deploy DevOps to achieve their goals.