23 Nov, 2022
What Are the Benefits of DevOps for Business Growth
DevOps is an evolving methodology & structure that fosters quicker, better application development and delivery of new or updated software features or products to users. In addition, DevOps promotes better, consistent communication, collaboration, integration, accessibility, and transparency among application Development teams (Dev) and their IT Operations team (Ops) counterparts. This more robust relationship between "Dev" and "Ops" encapsulates every phase of the DevOps lifecycle, from software planning to coding, building, testing & releasing, and then deployment, operations & monitoring. This article discusses some of the benefits of DevOps for business and how they can improve your business workflows.
Adopting a DevOps culture becomes critical for an organization due to competing and conflicting priorities, which can compromise product quality and speed. So, what is the purpose of DevOps? First, it eliminates bottlenecks between collaborating teams and the requirements of manual communication & processing delays through efficient automation.
Why is DevOps Important to a Company?
Customer satisfaction and faster value delivery are core DevOps attributes. It is also designed to stimulate business innovation and the continuous improvement of processes.
So, why DevOps is popular? DevOps promotes the reliable delivery of business value to an organization's customers. This value could emerge as more frequent product releases, features, or updates. It can refer to how quickly a product release or new feature reaches customers' hands while maintaining appropriate levels of quality and security. It can also focus on how easily an issue or bug is identified, resolved, and re-released.
The fundamental infrastructure also helps DevOps by ensuring software's smooth performance, accessibility & reliability as it is developed, tested, and released into production.
Benefits of DevOps for Business
DevOps brings a plethora of benefits to the table. From a technology perspective, there are numerous advantages of DevOps. To name a few, some of the business benefits of DevOps are as follows:
- Collaboration
The software methodologies before DevOps recognized the value that Dev, Ops, and QA teams could bring when they worked together. However, they could have placed a higher value on encouraging collaboration. So, it was only with the advent of DevOps that there was genuine encouragement for cross-departmental collaboration, thereby changing how departments functioned as a unit.
DevOps builds an environment where different teams collaborate to achieve common strategic objectives. It implies that your organization's teams will no longer be isolated and will no longer work toward department-specific goals. DevOps encourages collaboration by removing barriers between Dev/Ops/QA teams and enabling them to cooperate toward a common goal: forming more value for your organization, which will eventually help you produce more value for your customers.
Engineers are no longer only concerned with how their team can complete their tasks efficiently because everyone is responsible for the final product. It motivates people from various departments to collaborate and strategize areas for improvement in a product's operational workflow. This collaboration also allows your employees to expand and upgrade their technical skills in areas that only partially fall under their skill set. As a result, it's a win-win situation for your company and employees. - Speed
One of the benefits of DevOps for businesses is that it accelerates the speed at which your company operates. The quicker you release the software, the faster you can capitalize on the business value of the product features. In addition, due to a test environment, testing time for software upgrades is usually relatively short. However, testing a new product takes a long time because the operations team must set up a test environment. DevOps speeds up the delivery of software features and modifications through automated testing and integration.
DevOps requires your developers to monitor the product for any software updates or bugs throughout its entire life cycle. It reduces the time needed to monitor, locate, and fix bugs, resulting in a faster time to market. In addition, it will assist you in finding process errors and non-value-added processes. You'll be able to work on fixing them and, as a result, create value more quickly.
- Customer Satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is one of the factors that can either make or break a business. Your company must thrive because gaining new customers is much more expensive than retaining existing ones through higher customer satisfaction. Therefore, one of the essential advantages of DevOps is boosting customer experience and, eventually, customer satisfaction.
Feedback is an essential component of any DevOps implementation. Feedback loops enable end users—typically customers—to monitor the progress of the application build at various phases and suggest any desired modifications in most cases of enterprise application development.
Your customers hate waiting for your products, and the longer you keep them waiting, the more significant the negative impact. As indicated earlier, DevOps speeds up software delivery, directly and positively impacting customer satisfaction. In addition, since DevOps streamlines various aspects of your workflow, you will be able to sell your products at a lower price compared to a competitor who does not conduct DevOps.
- Innovation
DevOps may mean doing things faster and at a lower cost for most users. However, one clinical advantage that is usually ignored is business innovation. Business innovation can be defined as the process of brainstorming innovative ideas that, when implemented, will simplify operational workflows and add value to an organization. Innovation occurs through modifying an existing process or system, creating new ones, or incorporating a better option into an outdated process.
The key to unlocking innovation in software development is DevOps. We've seen how DevOps enables you to deliver software quickly. Rapid software delivery frees up some of your developers' time, allowing them to explore new features or enhance the efficiency of existing ones.
DevOps creates innovation by allowing teams to learn more and better understand the needs of their customers. It enhances and empowers an environment where strict instructions do not restrict developers. It signifies that, as long as the results are met, the scope of any specific project is always open to innovation.
- Quality and Reliability
The quality of your software is essential, and DevOps can help you optimize it. It changes how organizations conduct software testing. It is a crucial part of the SDLC and is responsible for all developers. Exploratory testing is encouraged by DevOps, which can improve software quality.
Another significant takeaway from the DevOps methodology is service reliability. Reliability is a system's capacity to operate consistently within its environmental constraints. The adoption of DevOps improves service reliability by increasing the availability and connectivity of services required for the smooth operation of a business.
- Agility
Customers today have high expectations in terms of product complexity and timely delivery. As a result, businesses must incorporate agility into their operations to meet such challenges and stay ahead of the competition. In this scenario, "skill" refers to various advanced capabilities.
DevOps strategies enable an organization to be adaptable when it comes to balancing capability as a result of changes in the market. It assists them in understanding how customers use the products and their overall priorities to deliver functionalities that add value to them consistently. It also empowers you to manage features and specifications for various applications on different platforms.
Furthermore, DevOps adoption enhances change management and ensures it does not slow down or disrupt the current process. Aside from that, it assists IT leaders in overcoming challenges commonly caused by siloed teams carrying out different isolated operations. However, you will probably encounter obstacles when using other tools across teams, and we can assist you in dealing with them.
- Security
Cybercrime is rising and costing businesses millions of dollars due to data breaches. So, how do you deal with it? It is where DevSecOps comes into play and handles the security of your applications.
DevSecOps expands on the essential components of DevOps, development & operations by incorporating security as a separate component in the pipeline. As a result, DevSecOps helps you lower costs because it allows you to monitor and identify security issues during the development process rather than spending a lot of money on security after the product is released.
DevSecOps implements continuous iterative improvements to make the security process much more manageable. It also speeds up the recovery process if any security incidents occur. Other valuable takeaways from implementing DevSecOps include the following:
- Reduced security flaws and insecure failures.
- Improved code quality.
- Empowering secure design patterns in the work process.
- Competitive Edge
The saying "each business is a software business" has become increasingly accurate these days, as demonstrated by the recent surge in the software industry. Every company should be able to ensure that the competitiveness wave does not sweep them away. Implementing DevOps can be the trump card in achieving a competitive edge.
Faster software releases, high-quality features, constant feedback integration, and maximized ROI are the major differentiating factors that help a business be competitive. The advantages of DevOps evaluate all of the above boxes. As a result, it offers a significant competitive edge over those who have yet to adopt DevOps.
- Cost Reduction
The most significant business benefit of a DevOps strategy is increased profitability. DevOps can reduce costs in various ways, either directly or indirectly.
Costs of Network Downtime
You cannot afford frequent network outages in today's fast-paced IT world. Nowadays, there are a variety of alternative software service providers.
So, how does DevOps support you in minimizing it? Bug-ridden code, poor service visibility, and overloaded infrastructure usage are the most common causes. DevOps, with its automated testing, continuous integration (CI), and continuous delivery (CD) methods, can assist developers in creating more efficient code as well as quickly identifying and fixing bugs.
Application performance monitoring (APM) tools can provide detailed visibility to all stakeholders because they can monitor and track changes in real-time. Another key aspect of APM tools is traceability, which gives specific information about what's going on in your code and how it affects end users. Cloud infrastructure can be extremely useful in managing your infrastructure. As a result, DevOps assists organizations in overcoming network downtime and saving costs.
Costs of Software Release
Handling an organization's software releases can become complex and costly, especially when managing many simultaneous releases. You know how much chaos it can create if you've ever been there. That is why you should strongly consider working with DevOps. It allows you to release software more quickly by automating your release pipeline. It also reduces the workforce required for the process and lowers software release costs.
Conclusion
The above information suggests that the technical and business benefits of DevOps are enormous. To summarize, a strong DevOps strategy and successful execution can significantly boost the effectiveness of your end-to-end delivery pipeline. In addition, you can transform the workplace culture by promoting automation and innovation. Finally, the benefits of DevOps for business can include increased ROI, better customer satisfaction, and improved employee performance.
If your organization is yet to implement DevOps, you should consider doing so. Whatever the factors holding you back, the advantages of DevOps are too significant to ignore. Our services can help you get started on your DevOps journey and assist you in gaining DevOps capability.