DevOps – Value Proposition for SME’s

DevOps is a methodology which solves the operational and logistics challenges of technology Delivery.

What is DevOps –

Imagine these scenarios –

  • Scaling up your Technology infrastructure and Landscape for another geographical region
  • Scaling up your Online Marketplace for Thanksgiving or Black Friday sale
  • Recovering from a massive data center failure
  • How to improve Go To Market Time, to improve customer satisfaction ?
  • How to improve delivery time to the customers?  
  • How to get faster ROI ?

To address above points what is your game plan? How much is automation involved here? How much manual effort and time does it cost? Is there a way that these all can be optimised? Answer is DevOps. If you have it in place you are already ahead of most competitors. To get the details on how these questions get answered by DevOps keep reading ..

DevOps In Business

Why is DevOps important ?

Advancement today has set for a world which is full of new technology that change at fast pace like Big Data, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and so on. Inspired by these just-in-time development and business process improvement, DevOps has become a global trend in the tech industry.   

Advantage of DevOps –

DevOps is a culture,  where as the term suggests Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams align much closer together and share in-between knowledge in improved ways. But DevOps is much more than this – it is a ‘state of mind’, a common approach to a problem. Businesses today has a point in implementing DevOps only if it’s directly contributing to the company’s increased productivity, effectiveness and, profitability. The only way that it is possible for small and medium enterprises is when the Development and Operations team work in sync and streamlining the provision of tech solutions that solve the business needs. Moreover Unbounded collaboration is achieved with notably higher rates of employee loyalty and engagement.

How to improve delivery time to the customers?

Analysis- DevOps methodologies when implemented in business models enable to break the complex and big projects into smaller modules of functionality that can be delivered on a steady rate. Hence the clarity and speed up of the release schedules and delivery timeline are reduced, allowing to create a buffer for any future changes on the same project.

Recovering from a massive data center failure

Analysis- Research also show that DevOps companies have an almost supernatural advantage of 30x the deploy frequency of their non-DevOps peers. Meantime to recovery process of DevOps also reduces 168x reduction to recover customer failures.

How to get faster ROI ?

Analysis- DevOps allows a business to release twice as fast, they can effectively double their annual revenue.Getting Paid for Faster returns in DevOps Is basically, reverse-chronological order of importance for an ongoing business:

  • Get money after you bill.
  • Bill after you deliver benefit.
  • Deliver benefit after you ship.
  • Ship after you’ve made the product.
  • Get money to make product.

Over a mid to long term duration there is 20% increase in annual revenue would be on par with enterprise averages, thus definitely a better ROI.

 

How to improve Go To Market Time and improve customer satisfaction ?

Analysis- Failure in DevOps is a mandate notion which is taken as a must to happen in real world. DevOps provides embracing the notion that you will fail and that you should even practice failing, this is a key mental step to focusing on meantime to recovery (MTTR). Moreover the process of Continuous deployment = continuous feedback allows  a chance to test users’ satisfaction in real time, adjust their products to customers’ needs, thus shaping a tighter market-product fit. Hence reducing failure factors in business models.

 

Realisation of the Hour!

DevOps for business

Currently Agile teams used automated build, test automation, Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

With DevOps that is extended further to “Infrastructure as Code”, configuration management, metrics and monitoring schemes, a toolchain approach to tooling, virtualisation and cloud computing to accelerate change in the modern infrastructure world. DevOps brings some tools on the block as well like configuration management (puppet, chef, ansible, cfengine), orchestration (zookeeper, noah, mesos), monitoring, virtualisation and containerisation (AWS, OpenStack, vagrant, docker) and many more. This makes the SME’s prosper with clients much better.

It makes ONE team with an objective to delivery software fully to the customer. So DevOps becomes the need of the hour for an organisation aiming to stay ahead of the competition. Get in touch with us if you would like to implement DevOps within your organisation or simply need any consultation or advice on it.

Security during development A Wise or Otherwise Decision

Web application security, cyber theft and cyber ransom are some of the most trending security topics in the internet these days. Despite the large number of antivirus companies and security professional out there, still the approach towards this is reactive and this common trend is indicating that the engagement of offensive security mind-set needs an increase of several magnitudes.

All security attacks pose risk to the business and risk can be mitigated with awareness and it holds good for security incidence also. When software developers get education on security which intern enables them to detect and protect their application in advance, when this happens to some extent application can be marked as protected. Though definition of Protected application is the matter of debate in security community as the how protected application is depends on who is attacking and who essentially is providing the protection. Real security would be implemented completely only when developers will be involved from the step one. Without the actual workforce involvement our assumption of having vulnerability free software systems seems very unrealistic.

When developers are writing code they are more interested in the problem solving and logical progression, they don’t want to lose the time in deployment process, most of the J2EE certified application servers when they run on development mode, time taken to publish the changes keeps everything on halt. personally have experienced this in WebLogic, WebSphere. In reality businesses exist to make money, none of them exist specifically to maintain security and fortify them with latest security systems.

2 things have been overlooked in the software development industry generally, one thing is the rapid feedback cycle, developers waste lots of time in deploying and executing their code than in coding, unfortunately there are not many products which facilitates real time deployment and security testing, we must admit that there are few but those too are not supported for every platform, these solutions have long way to go. Another problem that I could think of is vulnerability detection at the time of software development. These things are really fundamental to secure software development cycle and most importantly they should be open and free. Open source community needs to put some serious thought on this area which I feel is overlooked from long time.

Having the development time security detection not only reduces the cost and saves time but it also infuses security vulnerability awareness among developers. Lack of security specific understanding among developers is growing concern of product managers, additionally it enhances time to market your product.

Once we are successful in infusing this thought of writing secure code into the mind of developers, cost of security testing and remediation would eventually become negligible. Training programs that promote this goal will help us realize the positive outcomes shortly. All of sudden making them mandatory might sound like an order and creating compliance verses engagement problem. Management should handle this problem carefully. Initiatives which are started with sole aim of promoting secure coding practices should be fun to learn and implement. This seems the only way of achieving cent per cent security in software development cycle.

Bottom line is run time security issue detection and rapid feedback cycle is the demand of hour and software industry and open source community need to come up with serious plan of implementing and building frameworks where secure coding practices can foster and result into protracted software systems.