How DevOps can boost your business

DevOps is becoming one of the biggest buzzwords in IT and software development. Yet, there are many misconceptions about the impact of applying DevOps transformation to organizations, including the idea that DevOps only concerns tech teams. 

What are we talking about?

Divisions between technical, business, and cultural aspects of an organization are artificial and passé. They don’t fit with the new, interconnected ways of working in the 21st century. Outdated ways of working in silos originated back in the 20th century, yet there’s still a lag as not everyone has caught up with high-performing tech companies who have embraced DevOps.

So, let me ask you the following question: Is DevOps all about the automation of your development? What does DevOps have to do with your business? Furthermore, how can a DevOps transformation positively impact your business and its bottom line?

Most businesses in the 21st century – especially during the time of Covid19 when so much of the world underwent a digital transformation – understand that it’s essential to embrace digital transformation so as not to be left behind. Why not do it in the best way possible?

Let’s define DevOps

Any company can create its definition of DevOps. For me, it’s a flexible set of practices, guidelines, and cultures designed to break down silos in IT development, operations, networking, and security.

Many of us confuse DevOps as an upgraded version of your classic, old-school IT team. But DevOps can open doors and enable your new IT and development team to have a higher impact and improve your company’s business side of things.

When going deeper into a DevOps transformation, other parts of the organization must understand and react to the change. Hence, if your development team delivers fast and reliable products but does not align with sales, you only have half of the winning formula.

Before undergoing a DevOps transformation, the company must define some basic steps to help different teams work together using the same languages and tools.

Technical debt

DevOps can help your teams reduce the technical debt that your company has, enabling them to have more bandwidth for new features and improvements.

Technical debt is a concept in software development that reflects the implied cost of additional rework caused by choosing an easy (limited) solution instead of using a better, more sustainable long-term approach (that may initially require a more significant investment of time and capital).

As with monetary debt, if technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate "interest,” making it harder to implement changes. Unaddressed technical debt increases software entropy.

From a classic tech perspective, you can achieve a lot of influence on your business by becoming a DevOps organization, here are just a few examples:

Shorter time for development

With the right tools and methodology, your products arrive at the market quickly. In the past, software development used to be a long sequential process. It took companies months and years to release new versions. Nowadays, when your testing and deployments are automatic, releasing software will be faster and cheaper.

Better quality for your products

Better code quality means your development and product team can focus on new features and less on fixing bugs. When you are not using time and resources to fix bugs, you can create a realistic roadmap for your products with better communication between your sales and product teams.

Finding problems before your clients do

Many tech teams know how to set up monitoring tools, but they often miss some business-critical metrics. This happens because technical teams do not communicate well with sales and product teams.

Better monitoring methods allow your team to find many problems and bottlenecks in your software before the client discovers them.

No software is 100% reliable, but having the ability to fix issues before your client finds them is a huge advantage. Another benefit is that you understand where your bottlenecks are and reduce costs by understanding usage patterns.

Fixing problems faster

As a result of good automation and monitoring tools, fixing problems becomes much more accessible. When using the proper methodology and documentation, one can slowly improve most common issues quickly and without using many workforce resources. When you fix problems faster, your customers are happy, and your tech teams have high morale.

Innovation and experimentation

When your tech teams have the right culture and tooling, they have free time to improve and to help you grow your business. Having the ability to learn and experiment benefits your company and everyone in it. Software, like the world, is rapidly changing and you should be ready for any new challenges.

An empowered and happy team stays with you

When the demand for technical experts is high, like now, many members of your technical teams may be tempted to leave your organization for other offers. When used correctly, DevOps can help them have a more meaningful job and connection to their work and team. The fact is, when you remove most of the troubles we talked about earlier, people have more time to grow, learn, and experiment, which helps them feel proud of their work and their company – and be more likely to stay and help you grow.

All this is fine, but how can DevOps impact my business?

A huge problem is when some of the silos inside the technological organization are slowly being broken down. Yet, other silos still exist. For example, your development team is agile but disconnected from your sales and operations teams. In the long run, this is not sustainable and may cause friction and missed sales opportunities, for example.

That’s why using DevOps principles throughout a company – not just within the tech team – ensures communication between all parts of a business so it can be more accessible, agile, and profitable.

Examples of DevOps in practice

In our daily work, we see the things I’ve described above take hold and start to improve life in our client organizations. Here’s just a few examples of how our approach can make a mark:

1) Using better tools can help the operations team have more control over the provisioning of their infrastructure. In turn, they can save the company a lot of money. We see the same patterns when companies use classic monitoring tools that do not add much to the business.

Using a good observation tool with the proper techniques would add much information to your marketing and sales team. But even furthermore, we found out that using those tools would help your team have better visibility of their stack and better forecast their problems.

2) Testing and reviewing our customer's infrastructure is a simple task that can yield big benefits. In one such case, we found out our client uses too many reserved instances over the cloud.

We advised them to close the instances slowly and to use better ways to provision them.

That change is saving our customers a lot of monthly budgets they previously wasted on infrastructure they did not need.

Polar Squad offers a 360 DevOps Assessment that can help your tech and business team align and work together for better results all around.

Would you like to hear more? Contact our sales team or one of our lead consultants.

Yair Etziony is the head of operations for Polar Squad Germany. He has over twenty years of experience in various roles, such as QA engineer, System Engineer, and System administrator. Yair holds a BA in modern history and philosophy.