DevOps: Five Compelling Benefits to Gain a Competitive Edge

The ever-increasing complexity of systems, technologies, and processes put a strain on traditional approaches to delivering software products. Even within the same project, teams often worked in isolation, with broken communication lines and no shared focus on the end result.

To deal with these challenges, a new methodology — DevOps — emerged on the scene. Designed to remove barriers between developers and operations teams, DevOps promotes collaboration, improves deployment process, and enables continuous delivery of value.

Fostering a DevOps culture within your organization requires not only a mental shift but also a well-balanced set of skills. If you are lacking in-house expertise, partnering up with a reliable DevOps as a Service provider will help you kickstart your DevOps transformation and reap the benefits right away. Now, let’s see what exactly you gain.

Faster time to market

Given the market fluidity coupled with fierce competition, time to market becomes extremely important. Early movers can gain a larger market share, capture customer attention, and set industry standards.

To accelerate software delivery, DevOps provides a rich set of advanced tools and practices that support engineers across the entire lifecycle. ?ontinuous integration, delivery, and deployment help teams to efficiently automate time-consuming processes and reduce release time so that you can ship your software faster.

Greater business agility

Accelerated software delivery also drives market agility, enabling companies to quickly respond to changes and succeed in a competitive business environment. By practicing a DevOps approach, businesses can test new ideas faster, roll out new features quicker, and receive valuable user feedback to adapt their strategies.

Automating routine tasks that add no business value will free up your team’s resources for creative work and innovation, helping you stand out in a crowded market.

Reduced costs

There are a number of ways that DevOps can help you cut expenses and keep within your budget. Extensive automation, a cornerstone of a strong DevOps strategy, brings down human intervention to a minimum saving you multiple man-hours.

Another way to reduce expenditure is through early bug detection enabled by end-to-end automated testing. In a DevOps-driven process, rigorous automated tests start already on the coding stage when each code integration is verified to surface any errors and immediately address them. As fixing costs increase incrementally throughout the pipeline, the earlier you spot a problem, the easier — and cheaper — it is to correct it.

Enhanced software quality

In a DevOps culture of close collaboration, software quality becomes a shared responsibility. Developers work alongside QA engineers and practice continuous testing throughout the entire app development lifecycle.

From requirements to production, automated test scripts for continuous testing effectively cover all stages of the delivery pipeline. This ensures continuous quality monitoring and instant feedback to inform future development decisions and provide superior quality software.

Improved security

A shift-left principle promoted by DevOps enables project teams to introduce security early on in the process. In fact, a practice of building security into every stage of a development lifecycle is called DevSecOps. And given the growing complexity of security threats, DevSecOp is projected to gain traction in 2019.

Involving your security team early in the development cycle helps identify and mitigate any potential risks. By integrating automated security checks — static application security testing (SAST), penetration testing, code analysis, etc. — you can spot any issues and vulnerabilities before deployment so that your application can safely progress to customers.

Conclusion

Developing a sound DevOps strategy will take up time and resources, but the benefits are well worth the effort. With end-to-end automation and collaboration across all teams, DevOps will help you deliver your software to customers faster while improving its quality and security.