The pace of change continues to increase for enterprises intent on providing the best in product and customer service. For many companies this means increasing the rate of application development and deployment. The increased implementation of DevOps as a methodology has gained significant traction as it proves to be effective in delivering on its stated goals. I asked Andy Lewis, CIO of Kovarus to offer his thoughts on what CIOs should be thinking about as they prepare to implement a DevOps process. Here are Lewis' top 5 priorities:
- Empathy to what the business really wants and needs, namely: agility and empowerment. Current trends propagated by rapid development teams are forcing more automated and resource flexible IT infrastructure consumption models. CIOs who are not adopting and embracing the concepts of self-service portals with associated service catalogs are more likely to find themselves with the realization that they have no control over their data or resources.
- Begin with the biggest pain point: process and technology are well positioned for a win. This behavior is likely going to propagate from DevOps teams into general user behavior, and the ability to scale out resource pools while understanding and managing the security posture over sensitive data will be crucial.
- Ability to access required data sets quickly and securely will become 'standard' IT consumption. Secure and reliable high bandwidth connectivity between on-premise and cloud based infrastructure will be a core requirement as cloud based services will rely on real-time (dynamic) data sets for QA operations, which can only come from production data snapshots.
- Flexibility to accommodate demand needs to be built into the plan. Understanding costs and performance associated with on-premise and multiple cloud offerings which are today utilized for DevOps should be leveraged to plan for transition to a more dynamic IT posture. Such an environment will likely consist of a dedicated system for static applications, dynamically allocated resources (hybrid cloud) for seasonal spikes and development cycles, and SaaS application portfolio for non-core competency requirements.
- The new CIO needs to emerge with a clear understanding that this is not optional change. We are moving deeper into an on-demand world in our personal and professional existence. Anything viewed as otherwise becomes cumbersome and inhibits progress. To maintain its place as the value center instead of a cost center, CIOs have to empower their people and embrace change.
