DevOps praised, but divisions between development, operations hold fast

Dive Brief:

Businesses are slow to adopt DevOps, largely managing operations and application development separately, according to a 2nd Watch survey of more than 1,000 IT professionals. Only about 20% of respondents use a pure form DevOps.
Though 60% of teams run infrastructure as code tools, such as Terraform or Kubernetes, one of the underlying problems is almost 40% of respondents said their organizations are manually managing infrastructure, a process incompatible with DevOps.
Organizations are starting to automate deployment and management of code, which could eventually allow for more seamless DevOps adoption, according to the report. Almost one-third of organizations, however, have yet to create automated processes to test, build and deploy code.

Dive Insight:

Long-standing legacy practices have created a natural divide between development and operations in the enterprise. The result is a slow and inefficient technology deployment process, which can hold back the enterprise and introduce holes in security.

The status quo for enterprise technology deployment is operations will go to development teams with a set of requirements. But the departments remain isolated during the technology build and deployment stage. Working in isolation, some requirements can fall through the gaps leading to unsatisfied stakeholders.

But DevOps focuses on people, process and products, according to Mark Nunnikhoven, VP of cloud research for Trend Micro, speaking earlier this month at the Gartner Security and Risk Management Summit in National Harbor, Maryland. Through DevOps, delivery pipelines can have constant feedback loops between development and operations.

Through feedback loops, rather than unleashing an entire product at once, development teams can make small product changes and return to operations for input.

Technologists may evangelize the merits of DevOps, which takes agile beyond the bounds of software development. But without enterprise process changes, companies will remain slow to adopt the methodology.

Companies are still trying to figure out what works best for them. Though many leaders say agile is king, companies are slow to follow agile at scale across the enterprise. Instead, a bimodal approach has taken over, allowing different technology departments to move either fast or slow.