The buzzword "digital transformation" is in huge demand since the world was hit by the COVID-19 pandemic and most businesses had to shut down operations or face difficulties due to the traditional work culture. But most companies found a way by shifting their businesses to cloud-native platforms and using the latest technologies to improve their business efficiency and ensure their operations never shut down again in the future for any reason.
In the current digital era, most businesses are operated digitally, and companies need to make smart decisions at the right time to ensure their digital transformation journey goes smoothly as it is a never-ending process. Digital transformation doesn’t mean a change in the organizational shift of technologies, but there needs to be a shift in culture that gives the company an added advantage over its competitors. That is where DevOps becomes essential in digital transformation.
What is DevOps culture?
It is a process that involves development and operations teams having closer collaboration and sharing responsibility for tasks they do or maintain for a project. This culture creates a positive mindset in both teams by focusing on the product over the project. Development teams focus on the user requirements while they build, run, or test the application. The operations team is highly involved in agile development and adds maintenance requirements, customer needs, and inputs that make the product or service better than before.
The reason why DevOps culture is key:
In traditional methodologies of the software development life cycle, there are different teams for development, testing, and other operations involved in a project. But this is a time-consuming process and a bit risky when there is overload for any team. As they heavily rely on each other, it affects the process rate, which slows down the release of products or services. Due to this approach, there are chances of security issues and code compromise as development or testing teams do not have ample time to focus on their roles.
But this has to change even before making changes to technology and its supporting tools or software. That is when DevOps becomes vital. DevOps, the combination of the two words "development" and "operations," resolves issues encountered in traditional methods as it speeds up the release rate of products or services by creating cross-collaboration and communication between team members. This cultural emphasis on the word "we," which values teamwork and ownership of their duties, increases the quality of work that is beneficial for any business. Every business should have experienced DevOps engineers, as they are vital to implementing this culture effectively
Benefits of DevOps culture in digital transformation:
1. It gives priority to fast feedback, which enables continuous improvement of the development and operations teams. Teams work instantly on the feedback they receive, which improves the quality, performance, and efficiency of an application. This is missing in traditional culture
2. It ensures streamlined, frequent, and top-quality software releases with its tools and practices like CI/CD pipelines. (Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment), etc.
3. Through this culture, the trust levels and closeness between team members are rapidly developed, which is key for any business
4. It gives high priority to customer value.
5. This culture reduces the cost and time involved in a project as the teams work closely, which reduces silos and the number of handoffs. Upon that, there are fewer chances of errors, which saves time in rework and speeds up the process
6. One more benefit is that each member can focus on their core functionalities through the CI/CD pipeline, as the primary development process and subsequent deployment process are automated
7. As the deployment and development rate is high with no compromise in update releases, security features help businesses stay ahead of their competition
Challenges faced in developing a DevOps culture:
It is not easy for any company to implement this culture or DevOps practices until they are well planned and executed. There will be a few challenges that every business has to be aware of while embracing DevOps culture.
1. Organizations have employees who are lacking DevOps experts or lack the skills required
2. Businesses can fail while changing old processes to new and efficient ones, which can affect the business’s functionality and operations
3. Most businesses have budget challenges, especially small businesses.
4. Choosing the wrong tools or practices due to a lack of awareness
5. Pressure from stakeholders or investors in a business.
6. Having zero knowledge of the importance of the digital transformation industry in today’s business world
There are two ways to overcome these challenges. One is to hire an in-house team of DevOps experts with enough experience in this industry. The other is to tie up with the top and most experienced DevOps Consulting Companies from the DevOps community as they give the right advice and solutions that are best for business
DevOps culture is very key to digital transformation. Imagine the business changing its tools and technology to the latest ones, but following the same old and traditional work culture. Instead, businesses face many difficulties in their digital transformation journey. With the new technologies and tools, a new culture is mandatory where a business can take advantage of this transformation and meet new demands and requirements in the market. Most businesses that face challenges or cannot make the right decisions for any reason prefer digital transformation services in US, as they take on the responsibility of every task involved in this journey.