DevOps and the Cloud Are Essential to Digital Transformation

More and more companies are seeing the benefit of moving to the cloud, and for good reason. Cloud technology offers many benefits to better suit agile enterprises to spearhead digital transformation and keep their company competitive in the ever changing business environment.

It is imperative to design an agile IT architecture to prepare for fast-paced changes in the business landscape. Digital transformation has brought forth a need to be hyper respondent to the needs of our customers - which include rapid deployment of innovative products, services, and software.

Speed and agility are a byproduct of digital transformation but are often met with tension when it comes to traditional business practices. The development, testing, and deployment of new applications have been greatly affected by digital transformation. Previously, times to deployment varied greatly, as projects lingered in one of each stage while waiting for administrative advice or cumbersome bureaucratic orders.

DevOps as a solution

While simultaneously enabling faster times to deploy, DevOps also challenges strong traditions on how organizations communicate and operate. Utilizing the DevOps approach will also alter areas including code management, configuration management, and processes.

Effective Code Management - Where development teams once threw together raw code and left the testing for a later date, DevOps implores developers to perform rapid integration testing regularly to reduce errors and speed the time to launch.

Rapid Processes - Frequent feedback loops are a key benefit of employing DevOps. When software developers are encouraged to quickly produce a minimal viable product, testing happens sooner and important feedback is sent back to the developers. Using the DevOps development approach, bug fixes happen quicker, features and changes are added, and new versions can be rolled out faster than ever before.

Leveraging the cloud for digital transformation

According to Gartner, organizations save an average of 14% through cloud migration. Gartner also found that rapid IT and business transformation are major incentives for enterprises migrating to the crowd. There’s no question - moving to the cloud is essential to digital transformation. While implementing DevOps inadvertently tackles many challenges, it takes a specific plan to prepare your enterprise for the cloud and digital transformation.

Steps to the cloud :

• Assess your IT landscape, see which current systems and applications are suitable for migrating, or which need to be replaced, upgraded, or eliminated.
• Consider which framework is suitable for your company.
• Containerization and microservices are often used to migrate to cloud technology. There are also cloud vendors like PaaS. PaaS automatically provides the appropriate runtime container and middle-ware services for an application in a consistent environment across the application lifecycle, minimizes the costs of downtime and abstracts applications from infrastructure dependencies.
• Allow the existing systems to continue running while moving forward and investing time and resources in the new cloud-focused framework.

In this day of rapid IT transformation, your company will benefit from reinventing your IT architecture and incorporating DevOps and cloud technology into the landscape. EAs can achieve an aligned business and IT landscape, streamlined processes, faster times to market, quick insights, and full control over the whole enterprise’s architecture with the implementation of DevOps and cloud technology.