Software development and deployment can be quite a challenging task, particularly when you have to deal with a large and complex codebase. To make things easier, companies have driven towards the DevOps approach to software development and deployment. DevOps is a set of practices that incorporates software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to minimize the development life cycle while delivering features, fixes, and updates frequently, reliably, and with less risk. DevOps consulting can provide several benefits to businesses that want to adopt this software development and deployment approach.

How does DevOps work?
DevOps brings together different software development and deployment teams, including developers, operations staff, and quality assurance (QA) professionals. By breaking down silos and creating a culture of collaboration and communication, DevOps enables teams to work together more effectively and efficiently. This is achieved through automation, continuous integration, and continuous delivery (CI/CD) practices, which streamline processes and improve efficiency. Automation is used to eliminate manual processes, such as testing and deployment, which can be time-consuming and prone to error. CI/CD practices enable teams to continuously test and deliver software updates and new features, reducing time to market and improving quality.

Benefits of DevOps consulting
Here are the key benefits of DevOps consulting and how it can help businesses improve their software development and deployment processes.

1. Faster Time to Market
   One of the primary benefits of DevOps consulting is that it can help businesses bring their products to market faster. DevOps practices can streamline the software development process and reduce the time required for testing and deployment. Companies can release new features and updates quickly and more frequently, keeping up with their customers’ demands and staying ahead of their competition.
2. Improved Collaboration
   Another benefit of DevOps consulting is that it can help businesses improve collaboration between developers, IT operations, and other teams involved in the software development and deployment process. With DevOps practices, teams can collaborate seamlessly, share information, and coordinate their efforts, leading to faster and more efficient development and deployment.
3. Increased Efficiency
   DevOps consulting can also help businesses increase their efficiency and productivity. By automating many software development and deployment tasks, such as testing, building, and deployment, teams can focus on more critical tasks, such as writing code and developing new features. This can lead to faster development and deployment and, ultimately, better results for the business.
4. Cost Savings
   Another significant benefit of DevOps consulting is that it can help businesses save money. Companies can reduce their operational costs by improving efficiency and reducing the time required for development and deployment. Additionally, by catching errors earlier in the development process, businesses can reduce the cost of fixing problems and mitigate potential risks.
5. Scalability
   DevOps consulting can also help businesses scale their software development and deployment processes as they grow. With DevOps practices, companies can automate many tasks, such as testing and deployment, making managing larger codebases and complex software projects easier.
6. Reduced Risk of Failure
   DevOps consulting can also reduce the risk of failure in software development and deployment. By implementing automated testing and monitoring, issues can be detected and resolved more quickly, reducing the likelihood of major failures that could be costly for the organization. DevOps consulting can also help improve security measures, ensuring that software is developed and deployed with security in mind from the beginning.
7. Better Security
   With the help of DevOps consulting, organizations can improve their security measures. Implementation of automated security testing and monitoring can identify and address potential security issues more quickly, lowering the risk of security breaches and data loss. Additionally, DevOps consulting can help organizations to implement security best practices throughout the software development and deployment process, ensuring that security measures are considered from the beginning rather than being an afterthought.
8. Access to Advanced Automation Tools
   DevOps consulting can provide organizations access to advanced automation tools that may not be readily available in-house. These tools can help to streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and reduce the risk of mistakes in software development and deployment. DevOps consulting experts are often well-versed in the latest automation tools and techniques. They can provide valuable insights and recommendations on which tools are best suited to an organization’s needs.
9. Better Customer Experience
   DevOps consulting can also lead to a better customer experience. By improving collaboration and communication between teams, organizations can better understand the needs of their customers and deliver software updates and new features more quickly. This can help to keep customers engaged and satisfied and can lead to increased loyalty and revenue over time.
10. Continuous Improvement
    DevOps consulting can help businesses adopt a continuous improvement mindset. With DevOps practices, teams can continually monitor and evaluate their software development and deployment processes, looking for ways to improve efficiency, quality, and reliability. This can lead to better software, happier customers, and more significant business success.
11. More Time for Innovation
    Finally, DevOps consulting can help organizations free up more time for innovation. By streamlining processes and improving efficiency, teams can focus on developing new and innovative software features rather than spending time on manual processes or fixing errors. More time for innovation can boost creativity — a more innovative culture within the organization, leading to new revenue streams and growth opportunities. In a fast-paced market, innovation is key to staying competitive and relevant. And your DevOps consultant can help you achieve this by providing the tools and expertise needed to streamline your software development and deployment processes.

Conclusion
DevOps consulting can provide a lot of benefits to businesses that want to adopt this approach to software development and deployment. By improving collaboration, quality, efficiency, scalability, and cost savings, companies can bring their products to market faster, stay ahead of their competition, and ultimately achieve more significant success. If you are considering adopting DevOps practices in your business, consulting with experts can help you get started and ensure a successful transition. You can take the help of a trusted DevOps consulting services provider to improve your software development and deployment cycles.

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In the last few years, the rise of DevOps has transformed the way organizations approach software development and delivery. DevOps refers to a methodology that helps to improve collaboration, communication, and integration between development and operations teams, allow them to work as a single team and streamline the software delivery process. One of the key enablers of DevOps is automation. Automation plays a critical role in DevOps consulting by allowing them to automate many of the manual and repetitive tasks involved in software development and delivery. In this article, you can explore the role of automation in DevOps consulting and how it helps organizations achieve their goals.

What is DevOps consulting?
DevOps consulting is a methodology that brings together development and operations teams to deliver software in a more efficient and streamlined manner. DevOps aims to break down the silos between these teams, improve communication, and automate as many processes as possible to increase speed and efficiency. DevOps consulting involves a wide range of practices and tools, including continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD), monitoring and testing, and collaboration and communication tools.

Why Automation is Essential in DevOps Consulting
Automation is a critical component of DevOps consulting. It enables teams to automate many manual and repetitive software development and delivery tasks, freeing up time and resources to focus on more revenue-generating activities. Let’s learn about some of the key areas where automation plays a critical role in DevOps consulting:

1. Continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD)
   CI/CD is a crucial practice in DevOps consulting. It involves automating the build, testing, and deployment processes to enable teams to release software more frequently and reliably. Automation plays a critical role in CI/CD by allowing teams to automate the build and testing processes and the deployment of code to various environments. This minimizes the risk of errors and increases the speed of the delivery process.
2. Monitoring and testing
   Monitoring and testing are also vital in the software development process. They enable teams to identify and address issues before they become significant problems. Automation plays a critical role in monitoring and testing by allowing teams to automate the testing process and the monitoring and analysis of application performance. This enables teams to identify issues quickly and make the necessary changes to ensure the application runs smoothly.
3. Collaboration and communication
   Collaboration and communication are also crucial for DevOps consulting. They enable teams to work together more effectively and efficiently. Automation plays a critical role in collaboration and communication by allowing teams to automate many communication and collaboration processes. This includes the use of collaboration tools such as chatbots, automated notifications, and project management tools.

Benefits of Automation in DevOps Consulting
There are several benefits of automation in DevOps consulting, including:

1. Improved Speed and Quality: Automation of several manual and repetitive tasks involved in software development and delivery allows teams to complement a project faster and more accurately. Automation helps to improve the overall quality of the software, as fewer errors are introduced into the code.
2. Increased Efficiency: Automation also help developers to work more efficiently and effectively, which helps to reduce the time and resources required to deliver software. So, the overall development expenses reduce, which in turn increases the ROI of software development projects.
3. Reduced risk: Automation reduces the risk of errors and issues by automating many of the software development and delivery processes. This results in a more reliable and stable application.
4. Scalability: Automation enables teams to scale their software delivery processes more efficiently, allowing them to deliver software more quickly and with greater accuracy, even as the size and complexity of their projects grow.
5. Greater collaboration and communication: Automation also allows your teams to automate many communication and collaboration processes, enabling them to work together more effectively and efficiently.

How a DevOps consulting company helps its clients?
A DevOps consulting company helps its clients in several ways, including:

1. Assessing the current software development process: A DevOps consulting company assesses their clients’ current software development process and identifies areas where automation can be implemented to improve the quality and speed of software development.
2. Developing a plan: After assessing the current software development process, the DevOps services company develops a plan to implement automation tools and techniques to help clients achieve their goals.
3. Implementing automation tools and processes: A DevOps services company helps its clients to implement automation tools and techniques, ensuring that they are integrated into the existing software development process and optimized for maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
4. Eliminating silos between teams: One of the main areas where DevOps consulting companies can help businesses are eliminating silos between teams. This involves bringing together software development and IT operations teams to work together seamlessly.
5. Automating code testing, deployment, and monitoring: DevOps consulting companies help their clients to implement automation tools and processes for code testing, deployment, and monitoring. By automating these tasks, businesses can reduce the time it takes to develop and release software and improve the quality of software applications.
6. Providing ongoing support and training: DevOps companies provide ongoing support and training to ensure businesses can make the most of their automation tools and processes. They help companies to optimize their operations and tools and provide guidance on continuously improving their software development and delivery processes.
7. Improving collaboration and communication: By breaking down the barriers between teams, DevOps services companies help businesses to improve collaboration and communication, leading to faster and more efficient delivery of software applications.
8. Achieving business goals and objectives: By implementing automation tools and processes, businesses can achieve their goals and objectives faster and more efficiently. DevOps consulting companies provide the expertise and experience needed to identify areas where automation can be implemented and help businesses to achieve their goals and objectives.

Conclusion:
Automation is a critical component of DevOps consulting. It helps to improve the speed, quality, and reliability of software development and delivery. By implementing automation tools and processes, companies can minimize the time and resources it takes to develop and release software, improve the quality of software applications, reduce costs, and increase agility. A DevOps consulting company can help businesses implement automation tools and processes, ensuring that they can deliver software faster and with higher quality.

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Organizations cannot ignore digital transformation to sustain in this rapidly changing world. DevOps and cloud computing has become essential for organizations to achieve digital transformation and increase competitiveness.

DevOps and cloud computing has different purposes to achieve — DevOps contributes to process improvement, while cloud computing helps improve technology and services. Every organization must have a depth knowledge about how the cloud and DevOps together can influence your businesses to achieve their digital transformation goals.

According to a recent report, individual implementation of DevOps or cloud can accelerate software delivery by 50%, while together, they exhibit an acceleration of 81%. It is clear that cloud and DevOps together can improve productivity. Let’s learn how DevOps and the cloud together can help to improve your business.

Cloud & DevOps together help to accelerate software delivery.
When your applications are already moved to the cloud, you can modernize the hosting platform to take advantage of the latest cloud services. Most private and public cloud service provider support DevOps on their platforms. DevOps automation is one of the efficient approaches that help to reduce the complexity and labor associated with routine jobs like maintenance tasks. DevOps approach also allows on-demand scalability that helps to streamline software delivery and deployment. As a result, you can quickly minimize the expenses needed for over-provisioning resources common in on-premise environments. Overall, these improvements help free up more time and energy for innovation and value-adding work that will enhance customer satisfaction.

In short, cloud DevOps tools allow your developers to spend more time in development jobs and your operations staff to concentrate on their tasks instead of being bombarded with extensive unplanned work. If your developer and operation teams work haphazardly, you have to struggle to achieve success with large unanticipated tasks, and the whole delivery process will be delayed.

Cloud and DevOps together can improve operability
Adopting the DevOps approach and cloud platforms can help organizations improve their operational activities by making them more accurate and focused. When ready to scale up their business, start-up organizations can benefit from the combination of cloud and DevOps.

Partnering with reputed and trusted cloud services providers will help you to achieve operational excellence, security, reliability, cost-optimization and performance efficiency. With the expert guidance of managed IT services provider, you can incorporate and operate your cloud effectively. They can also guide you in taking decisions and priorities related to DevOps-led processes. With the help of a cloud + DevOps services partner, you can reconfigure systems in a targeted and systematic way to improve operability that will support and accommodate your future growth plans.

Cloud and DevOps together can help to lower the cost of ownership
Cost optimization is always a top priority for all Chief Technology Officers (CTOs). As cloud adoption is rising, the IT budget is also increasing simultaneously. In such situations, DevOps can help you with cost optimization.

In traditional on-premise server environments, businesses must be ready for their maximum requirements. They have to spend for over-provisioned on-premises servers to provide adequate capacity for peak demand. The traffic spike can happen annually, monthly, or more frequently (like weekly) for different industries. And the rest of the time, you need a much lesser quantity of resources to run your business. Here the point is you have to pay for that peak capacity every day throughout the year, which is pretty expensive. Even turning off servers during the non-peak time will not be much cost-effective. Turning off servers will reduce the power cost, but you still have to pay for the rack space, network provisioning and software licences.

The DevOps approach allows you to take full advantage of the rapid elasticity cloud computing offers. With automation of provisioning, application deployment and orchestration, you have to pay for the exact capacity you need at a particular time. In this way, you can minimize IT expenses.

How do you combine cloud and DevOps?
Along with cost-optimization, cloud computing and DevOps help you optimize your software development lifecycle (SDLC) and develop high-quality software quickly and efficiently. To take advantage of cloud and DevOps together, you should adhere to the best practices:

1. Keep track of your progress:
   In your software development lifecycle, you must describe all the processes and workflows and identify the person responsible for each task. You have to look for ways to make cloud development processes more efficient and faster, such as automated or enhanced processes. When following an agile methodology, you should aim to create short sprints while developing an application.
2. Make use of a fully automated CI/CD workflow:
   The process of building and delivering software can be automated as the next level of the pipeline using continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) solutions. Your cloud and DevOps infrastructure together will be more efficient and agile by integrating CI/CD automation with your existing system.
3. Reduce the feedback loops:
   An automated testing facility helps in finding bugs in your code. It just reduces your task by half, and being automated, there is no chance of errors. At the same time, the concerns are reported to the appropriate teams, which helps in quick resolve. This is an efficient way to speed up the feedback process — automated issue detection, reporting and response technologies allow for faster project completion.
4. Create a team atmosphere:
   To properly utilize cloud and DevOps together, your staff need to know about both concepts before providing them with the cloud DevOps tools. To do this, it is necessary to provide essential training, eliminate information silos, promote the exchange of innovative ideas, upgrade with needed skills and consider failures as learning experiences.

Conclusion
Incorporating DevOps along with cloud adoption will help organizations not only to save money and accelerate innovation but also helps to improve work culture. A modern and efficient work environment makes your staff happier and more motivated. Employees become more enthusiastic and energized by their work. This positive approach brings a willingness toward change, acceptance of newer things and growth. With the help of managed IT service providers, your cloud and DevOps journey can be easy and more productive.

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After the prolonged pandemic and subsequent lockdowns, businesses are now focused on rapid improvements in digital solutions to achieve fast growth and development. To achieve the desired success, organizations throughout the globe are incorporating the DevOps culture. The incorporation of DevOps can streamline their deployment and improve development speed, maintenance, and management of creating full-fledged software.

The main focus of DevOps culture is to involve closer collaboration between development and operation teams and share responsibilities for the products they develop and maintain. This work culture helps organizations align their staff, processes, and tools to achieve better success.

Organizations prefer the DevOps methodology to ensure time management, faster production cycles, improvements in the existing system, and a transparent development system. When you want to implement a suitable DevOps culture in your organization, you need to collaborate with your developmental and operational teams for better work infrastructure. Let’s see how a thriving DevOps culture can influence your business growth:

1. Create a collaborative environment

The DevOps culture is all about increasing transparency, improving communication, and better collaboration between teams that used to work as separate entities in the traditional system. To successfully implement DevOps culture in your organization and get its benefits, first, you need to bring your development and operational people together to work in sync and meet common objectives. You can help your teams collaborate in a better way by sharing ideas. Professionals of both teams need to communicate, share ideas, and come up with solutions as per the business nature and scope.

To establish a collaborative environment, employees must accept the cultural shift and work as one team. You can consider following a top-down strategy to have a collaborative environment. A top-down initiative helps to apply a desired cultural change and makes it easy for employees to accept as it starts with the topmost levels.

2. End-to-end responsibilities

With conventional software development models, development and operation teams work separately, and both have separate roles to play. But, when you follow the DevOps culture, the teams have to work as a unit and remain equally accountable for making an application from beginning to end.

Writing codes and deploying them are two individual tasks. There can be differences between the actual product and expected performance. DevOps implementation is the way to reduce this difference and make the application development cycle faster. DevOps culture makes the whole team take the responsibility and control of services from concept to grave.

When the development and operations teams collaborate effectively, they can make decisions with internal communication and implement changes without a cumbersome or lengthy approval procedure. Basically, DevOps culture runs on the trust of teams and establishes a work culture where there is no fear of failure.

3. Encourage continuous improvement

To stay competitive in today’s world, you need to adjust to the ever-growing environments in terms of customer demands, tools and technologies, or even changes in the policies. You can consult with DevOps consulting companies to make your cultural shift smooth and ensure continuous improvement of your software creation process.

With DevOps implementation, you can focus on optimizing performance, improving the delivery speed, and ensuring cost-optimization. With faster releases and minimal downtime, you can ensure the satisfaction of the potential customers and loyalty among the targeted ones.

4. Automation

Considering AWS DevOps services, you can enjoy the advantages of automation. Several organizations now prefer automating their processes to respond to customer feedback, analyze data and know the changes in the buying patterns to upgrade their services.

Automation also frees up your resources to concentrate on other revenue-generating tasks. It can even improve the collaboration between teams. By automating all possible processes of software development, DevOps helps your team to build, test, and release software faster and helps to accomplice a job more reliably.

Automation allows your team to produce error-free outcomes and also ensures timely delivery without compromising the quality, features, and functionalities of the end product.

5. Focusing on customers’ needs

Organizations need continuous innovation and dynamism to cope with the changing customer demands and deliver tailored offerings. Transparent communication, effective collaboration and innovative ideas are the keys to bringing in the much-needed transformation in your business process.

Incorporation of DevOps culture can help to track the ever-changing consumer needs and allow your team to develop customized offerings to meet them. Automated systems will enable you to collect data about your clients’ needs and review them constantly to check whether the business targets are fulfilled or not. To focus on your clients’ needs and develop customer-centric products, you need to have an appropriate data collection system and thoroughly analyze it.

6. Accept failures as a lesson

Usually, companies, teams, and even individuals put excess pressure on themselves and each other to avoid any kind of mistakes. But when you don’t have the option of failure and have to come to a solution, an individual or team comes up with a positive approach. It focuses on innovative and effective ideas to solve a problem. Now, this cultural change helps your team to think differently. An earlier system of measuring “Mean Time Between Failures” (MTBF) uses tools like “root cause analysis” to find out the root cause of a failure, and teams have to try to prevent them from happening again.

On the other hand, the current measurement of “Mean Time to Recovery” (MTTR) allows your unified team to consider software applications as complex systems and accept the fact that they can fail in unpredictable ways. So, the team needs to focus on quick recovery when they fail.

Conclusion

When you want to enrich your organization technically and streamline your software development processes, it will be the best choice to incorporate DevOps in your workflow. In this fast-paced world, DevOps is the right option to facilitate you in terms of faster, error-free development cycles, employee engagement, customer satisfaction, improvement of the operating modes, and so on. You can consult DevOps consulting services to help you with DevOps implementation and enjoy the benefits of this culture and influence your business growth.

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DevOps is a widespread IT practice that aims to shorten the software development lifecycle. Basically, it combines the development, operations, and testing team as a cross-functional team and creates a robust operating environment for bringing code to market faster. DevOps practices also reduce human errors and bugs, improve version control, and optimize costs. Several organizations prefer to implement DevOps practices and tools for a faster to market approach. By facilitating effective communication, greater collaboration, and integration across the organization, DevOps can improve software development and delivery agility and simplify IT management.

When planning to start your DevOps journey, first, you need to decide whether you want to go for a greenfield or brownfield deployment. Whatever is your choice regarding the mode of development, it is always wise to run a pilot project first. Based on the outcome of the pilot project, you can consider implementing DevOps throughout the organization. Here are key steps to follow that can help you to make your DevOps journey successful.

1. Cultural shift in the key:

In the way of successful DevOps implementation, your pre-existing work culture can be a huge road blocker. Instead of an individual team entity, DevOps integrates your human resources, processes, and tools into a single entity – a cross-functional team. This cultural shift is the backbone of DevOps. You cannot expect an overnight transformation. Introducing new policies and procedures is not enough to make your staff understand the new concept and motivate them to adopt the new culture. You need an organization-wide cultural change, and that must begin with the top-level management. Then it will be easier to convince the remaining workforce and make a smooth cultural transformation. You need to ensure that everyone in the organization (developers and operations personnel) knows about their role and responsibilities to perform as a part of cross-functional teams.

To facilitate the cultural shift, you can make changes to your incentive models. You can reward your cross-functional teams for delivering a better product or providing a better customer experience while making any failures least expensive for the organization. Implementing strategic and thoughtful incentive programs is an effective way to motivate your staff to accept the cultural shift.

2. Make as many metrics as possible

For a successful DevOps adoption, you need to select the right metrics to track your progress. Some of the most useful baseline DevOps metrics that can help to measure your progress over time are:

• Production failure rate,
• Meantime to recover from a failure,
• Average lead time (time needed to build, test, deliver, and deploy a new requirement into production),
• Deployment speed (how much time you need to deploy a new version of an application),
• Deployment frequency
• Meantime to production, and so on.

By recording and tracking those matrices, you can identify your current position on your desired success roadmap. So, you need to set goals for each matric and motivate the team to achieve that.

For the best outcome, you need to share your DevOps goals, metrics, and progress with every employee involved in the cycle. Setting up metrics dashboards to display operational metrics and respective progress toward your goals, effective communication, and better collaboration will help break down conflicts between the development and operation teams.

3. Understand your unique needs and address them

Every organization has specific needs and work culture. Incorporating automated tools and hiring a DevOps engineer is not sufficient to ensure the desired success. You can consult DevOps consulting services to get the right tools to enable the required automation or make necessary changes in your work culture.

4. Adopt iteratively

Instead of implementing an organization-wide DevOps initiative, starting with a smaller initiative is wise. Start with a pilot application, formation of a cross-functional DevOps team, evaluate the outcomes to identify the limitation and bottlenecks, measure progress, and, if succussed, you can implement the techniques for more significant aspects.

With the collective outcome of the pilot projects, you should work to resolve the constraints. You also need to ensure that you are making progress against your metrics. Then only you should consider implementing the same strategy on other teams.

5. Focus on quality assurance

It is quite a common practice in most organizations that testers get the minimum amount of time to ensure the quality of the final product. As a result, the product quality suffers. In most cases, companies struggling with DevOps are often found to focus on automating deployments and ignoring QA needs.

As it is difficult to automate all testing jobs in DevOps, you must include all testing as a part of your regular integration process and incorporate testing in every stage. Don’t forget to include regression testing and smoke testing to perform on each environment to ensure the overall quality. You can automate some functional and non-functional tests associated with performance, security, etc., to speed up the comprehensive testing procedures and ensure the quality of your product as well.

6. Take a smart approach to automation

Automation is the key to accelerating your delivery processes by making everything, including IT infrastructure, development environment, platform, system configuration, QA process, etc., suitable to execute a program flawlessly. Focus on automating time-taking and error-prone procedures first. This will help to reduce delivery time by removing the chance of multiple fixations and regression cycles.

Apart from testing and development automation, you must focus on standardizing and automating other phases of the life cycle to improve the overall speed of the delivery cycle. You must consider using software engineering best practices to design DevOps automation. You can go for creating your Infrastructure as Code(IaC) with your coding standards, test them and make good documentation of them. Your automation initiatives must be favourable to improve your delivery time without compromising the quality of your application.

Conclusion

You cannot incorporate DevOps in your organization overnight. You cannot expect a paradigm shift in no time — it requires a lot of hard work, cultural change, and discipline. Your DevOps journey may take time, and you face some challenges, but you can achieve the desired success over time if you follow the steps mentioned above. DevOps implementation is not a one-time solution – it is a journey that is never done. You need to improve your system continuously to deal with the changed requirements of your business. You can also partner with a DevOps consulting company to help you improve your DevOps journey and reach your business goals.

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One of the latest trends in the IT industry is ‘DevOps’. Large and medium-sized businesses have already driven DevOps practice to enjoy benefits like improved productivity,  easy maintainability, minimal risk, better quality, cost efficiency, and excellent results.

If you also want similar organizational changes, you can consider implementing DevOps. For effective implementation of DevOps, it is important to be aware of different concepts, tools, practices, and processes involved in this. Here you can have a simple yet comprehensive guide to what DevOps is and how you can implement that in your organization from scratch.

What is DevOps?

In simple words, DevOps is a methodology or set of practices meant to improve work throughout the software development lifecycle and aims to shorten the lifecycle. The main purpose of DevOps is to improve the productivity of the team and the quality of the software through better collaboration, communication, engagement, and process automation between software developers and IT operations.

How to Start DevOps from Scratch

To successfully implement DevOps in your business, you need to start with the basics, and it is vital to know about every concept, tool, and practice. Here are seven steps to start DevOps from scratch.

Programming Language

Programming language plays a crucial role in DevOps—it allows you to check and upgrade system resources and manage them effectively. With proper knowledge of programming language, you can develop a great piece of error-free code that allows optimization, scalability, and portability. Some popular languages to learn for DevOps are C, C#, Java, Python, and Ruby. Perl, JavaScript, etc., are popular scripting languages.

Be Familiar with Essential Operating System (OS) Concepts

Being well aware of essential OS concepts makes you increasingly productive. It allows you to code faster and optimizes processing, memory, and disk usage. Understanding the concepts of process management, Kernel management, resource management, I/O management, memory management, virtualization, filesystem architecture, and device drivers is essential for the proper implementation of DevOps.

Cloud Deployment

Understanding cloud deployment is also crucial. It helps you configure multiple servers in DevOps, like infrastructure, application, networking, web server, database, etc. Knowledge in cloud deployment allows you to move on without rewriting configuration files and also helps to scale up and down servers dynamically. You can consider taking the help of modern software to manage your servers in an advanced manner.

Networking and Security

Knowing networking and security is essential to create a secure environment to test your functions. It also helps to establish continuous integration and delivery pipelines. Knowledge about networking tools like Ansible and Jenkins can be beneficial to configure DevOps network devices.

Learn About CI/CD Pipeline and IaC

The implement DevOps methodology, you need to be well-aware of Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), DevOps Lifecycle, and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

DevOps Automation Tools

DevOps is all about automation. Development, configuration, log management and monitoring can be challenging and time-consuming without a proper automation tool. So, it will be helpful to adopt automation tools to eliminate limitations. Multiple automation tools are available in the market, such as Amazon Web Service (AWS), Jenkins, Prometheus, Nagios, Splunk, etc.

Get The Right Cloud Providers

Cloud services like SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS can play a crucial role in successful DevOps implementation. You need to do your research and get the best cloud partner to get essential cloud services to improve your development cycle.

Building DevOps Roadmap

It is very much essential to have a sound roadmap for DevOps implementation. First, your need to set the DevOps goals and objectives as per business needs. Then you need to

formulate your DevOps strategy to achieve the goals. And make sure your strategy includes a monitoring plan and policy. After strategy planning, the next step is containerization. This helps in the fast application and testing of minor changes and micro-services on the Ops end. Containerization improves software flexibility and reliability to a great extent. The next step is integrating of CI/CD pipeline into the infrastructure. This is a crucial step as it influences the development cycle most. Next is automation testing. It ensures rapid delivery cycles.

QA-Dev (quality assurance and development) alignment helps developers quickly detect bugs and address the problem before software release. The next step is performance monitoring. It provides transparency to the DevOps processes. This way, you can establish a faster software development cycle and easily detect the root causes of defects during the development phases.

Best Practices for Successful DevOps

To ensure high productivity, enhanced integration and collaboration, bug-free coding, and automated testing, you must follow the best DevOps practices. Here are the six key practices to help you achieve the ultimate business goals.

Evaluate Your Business Needs

First, you need your ensure whether your business actually needs this change. If you implement DevOps just as one of the latest trends without necessity, it will be a disaster. So, you need to evaluate your business needs and ensure that they align with the DevOps objectives.

Priorities Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the center of every development process, including DevOps. You need to prioritize your customer needs, focus on them, and also keep the DevOps team on the same track.

A Baby Step at a Time

DevOps makes you break the huge chunks of projects into smaller pieces. It allows you to have smaller but faster release cycles. One small step at a time reduces the chances of mistake and provide you with the room to scale up.

Incorporate Automation in Every Possible Way

DevOps encourages automating every possible process to generate better and more efficient results. So, it is essential to identify when and where automation can be implemented. You can implement automation in several processes like code writing, resource configuration, networking, load testing, etc.

Go For Compatible Tools

Opting for the right tools is important. They need to be compatible with each other and align with your IT environment. A set of appropriate tools help you reduce any conflict between your developers and operations team.

Create a Feedback Tool

Transparency is crucial for stakeholders as well as end-users trust. A feedback tool can ensure transparency between the DevOps team, stakeholders, customers, and end-users. It provides you with the opportunity to identify risks, limitations, and defects at the right time.

Conclusion:

If enthusiastic enough, you can fold your sleeves and start your work to implement DevOps in your organization following the above-mentioned steps and best practices. You can also consider consulting DevOps consulting services to get experts’ help to do the same.

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DevOps is growing as one of the top choices for startups. It is considered as a solution to provide strength and coordination capabilities to internal teams. In simple words, DevOps improves the coordination of development and the operational team in delivering services. So, both teams can function in respective parameters and perform all required functions in a synchronization. Many organizations have already realized the need to hire DevOps consultant services for a better outcome.

A DevOps consulting service can help your staff achieve business goals more efficiently. Adopting a DevOps culture can help you deal with teams’ conflicting priorities and allows a speedy delivery of products. For optimum results, first, you need to choose the right DevOps consulting service. Let’s see the critical things to consider for having the best consulting service for your organization.

Why should you go for a DevOps consultant?

The main reason behind the growing need for DevOps is its contribution to improving the efficiency of businesses in their functioning. DevOps helps in the proper management and streamlining of software development and deployment. The DevOps consultants are not software developers or QA experts—they know how to optimize the team’s output to complete projects within time. Hiring DevOps consultants can help you with:

• Optimization of tools’ usage and teams work in the project
• Improving the efficiency of software testing
• Implementation of cutting edge software or tools
• Workflow automation
• Faster delivery to market

Whether you are looking forward to process automation, continuous integration, structural transparency, technical scalability, etc., — everything is possible with the proper implementation of DevOps. DevOps implementation can offer multiple benefits to your business, and for maximum benefits, you may consult DevOps consulting services. The consultants assist you in DevOps implementation and enjoy the full benefits.

Key considerations to hire suitable DevOps consulting services

1. Do a thorough background checking of the service provider

When opting for a DevOps consultant, it is essential to verify whether they have the capability and explicit knowledge about computer architecture to support you. You should talk with the DevOps consultants to know about their work processes, service packages, detailed information about the working of the servers, network technologies, and so on.

You need to do your homework – background checking, look for reviews from reliable sources, etc. All you need to do is make sure that the chosen consultant have relevant knowledge related to DevOps to tackle the bottlenecks. An efficient and desirable DevOps consultant must have the knowledge related to the configuration or debug of the technology, underlying technologies and their operations, and so on.

2. Consider the expertise of the DevOps Consultants

Experience matters. When looking for the right service provider, you need to be sure about the consultants’ capabilities. To verify the capability, you can thoroughly check their technical certifications. But, at the same time, the working experience of the professionals is also vital. Formal technical training helps the professionals to get started with the work, but that is not the only criteria for consultants to assign full responsibility for the DevOps processes. Here the experience is vital to choose DevOps consulting services.

May a certified consultant have the proficiency in building a platform, but that doesn’t guarantee you the capability to operate and debug the operations as well. For maximum benefits, you should look for professionals who have the expertise to handle the responsibility for all the processes.

3. Beware of overconfident consultants

Consultants may commit to providing every facility and come up with a ‘know-it-all’ perception to make a service contract with you. But you must be clear about the fact that the technologies are ever changing and they change very fast with time. So, the attractive service offering and the past skills of your service provider can become irrelevant as well. It is better to look for professionals who believe in the constant improvement of their services and focus on the deliverables. It is good to go for the passionate learners as they can provide the best services through out-of-box thinking capacities. Ensure that your consultant has clarity of mind to deliver flawless DevOps consulting services.

4. Communication skills of the consultant in important

Communication skill is one of the crucial aspects to conveying the right message. It helps to maintain clarity among the client and the service provider and enhance efficiency. The DevOps engineers with the best communication skills help you to maintain the level of transparency. You must look for a DevOps consulting company with a high reputation as a good communicator for maximum benefits.

Before opting for the right DevOps services company, make sure they agree to keep their communication channel constantly open. You should also ask for DevOps consultants having the experience of working with development teams and maintaining good communication.

5. look for the right skillsets for your organization

To get the right DevOps service provider, you should focus on selecting DevOps professionals with the right skills that can contribute to your development processes. Personal traits of a consultant or a fabulous qualification will not contribute to your business. Still, professional expertise in the same field will help you make it faster and more efficient. Your hiring goal should align with your business goals and thus select DevOps consultants with the right skills.

6. Make a proper plan for hiring

The DevOps process involves effective and accurate planning to deliver the desired results. An efficient DevOps services company should work with clients to ease your tension of resolving the ineffectiveness in the process. They try to find a way to deliver efficiency and effectiveness in the functioning of various departments. So, first, you need to consult with the DevOps experts to understand their way of work and how they can meet your needs. You should decide on DevOps consultants after a thorough evaluation of your business requirements and consultants efficiency.

Conclusion

The right DevOps consultant can help you improve efficiencies within your internal teams to tackle various challenges. When opting for a DevOps consultant, ensure they acquire the relevant experience in implementing the technology as per your business needs. It is better to avoid DevOps consulting services that only believe in automation with cloud infrastructure —the main focus needs to be on developing the business environment with DevOps.

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The emergence of DevOps was a massive progression in the field of software development that allows the workforce to work with a better collaborative approach.  

Over the years, organizations have tried multiple software development processes including, waterfall development, agile principles, etc., to improve the development cycle with a better and faster outcome. And, a huge percentage of those organizations are now convinced to implement DevOps best practices for betterment. In such a situation, it is a good opportunity for start-ups to embrace DevOps practices from the beginning and avoid the mistakes made by other organizations.

Let’s see how DevOps infrastructure can influence the success of start-ups.

Benefits of DevOps for start-ups

Every start-up needs to be fast enough in delivering its products to compete with its rivals and win the game. So, it is crucial for them to have smooth and efficient development and delivery processes. Incorporating the DevOps approach in the development process can ensure non-stop features release and product improvement as well.

Here are the main advantages of implementing the DevOps approach in development processes from the starting.

Automation

The statistics show that organizations that implement DevOps methodologies properly can automate about 95% of their day-to-day manual tasks. So, the developers have to spend minimal time on product maintenance tasks like debugging, etc. It allows the developers

to focus on product improvement and new development tasks.

Automation also helps to reduce to chance of error occurrence caused by manual tasks. Plus, automated testing before actual development saves from resource wastage. So, reliable equipment and services remain more available for effective tasks.

Faster Deployment

Time is a crucial component for any start-up. Implementation DevOps in business processes can deploy about 70% faster than competitors!

Improves communication among teams

Clear and effective communication among various teams –  from developers to QA, contribute a lot to the success of a project. When team members interact more actively, they can easily resolve challenges encountered during operation.

Higher quality

Implementation of automated testing, log management, continuous monitoring and CI/CD pipelines helps organizations deliver top quality products to their clients. Efficient maintenance and debugging facilities allow them to eliminate critical bugs in production and also improve performance metrics.

Customer-centric production

When implementing DevOps practices, they help to improve the overall response time. CI/ CD principles are based on customers’ requirements and their behavior while using your service.

Tips for incorporating DevOps services for the success of start-ups

To enjoy the benefits of DevOps, you need to be careful about the proper setup and implementation of respective practices. Otherwise, you may lose your valuable time and be vulnerable to technical debt. Here are tips to make the DevOps adoption beneficial for your organization and achieve further success.

Well-architected infrastructure in the cloud

Different public cloud providers, like AWS, Azure, etc., offer multiple services that can help you build a robust infrastructure in the cloud. So, the organizations adopting cloud computing from the beginning can utilize all the advantages of High-Performance Computing (HPC), serverless computing, microservices, CI/CD. All these are needed for DevOps best practices to build a well-architected infrastructure.

To develop a reliable, secure and highly efficient infrastructure for your software/application, you need to concern about the following five points to achieve excellence.

1. Business process: Business process optimization is the first step. Without proper business processes in place, there is a chance of failure due to poorly developed infrastructure, even with a team of the best developers. So, you need to be concerned about automation, daily operations management, and disaster recovery scenarios.
2. Security – This theory focuses on Security – it is the most important aspect to consider when developing architecture from scratch. Here you need to focus on data security and confidentially, users’ role management, and signaling.
3. Sustainability: It helps to prevent failures and, if any accidents happen, faster recovery from a disaster.
4. High performance: It mostly deals with issues like selecting the right technology stack, calculating workload, monitoring efficiency, and making data-driven decisions.
5. Cost of infrastructure maintenance: For every start-up, cost optimization is a crucial aspect. You need to learn how to analyze your spending over time and develop an efficient budget.

Infrastructure automation (IaC)

DevOps workflow explicitly focused on managing and optimizing. And that needs a reliable infrastructure(networks, virtual machines, load balancers, and connection topology). Infrastructure automation (also called infrastructure as code, or just IaC) works to eliminate most of the issues that can cause an environment drift in the release pipeline. IaC boosts productivity through automation and establishes consistency in configuration and setup. It also reduces the risk of human errors, which ultimately increases software development efficiency and facilitates financial saving.

Containerization

To make your team of developers work together on the same repositories needs proper setup of development and testing environments. And, containerization is the best solution to provide a uniform system environment to everyone. Implementation of docker can make sure that all developers use the same environment configuration. So, when an application works with new features on the dev machine, with containerization, it has much higher chances to work in other environments also.

There are multiple docker orchestration tools available in the market, and you can choose the right one as per your dev requirement. It is also important to select the right tool to get optimum results, or your development process may slow down.

Log management and monitoring tools

Log management and the ability to get quick feedback on issues is crucial that helps developers to find the root causes quickly. With appropriate tools, debugging the application will become quite easy. With appropriate instruments or their analogs, your developer will have quite a good level of visibility on what is happening with the application.

Continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD)

The key benefits of continuous integration-continuous deployment are the requirement of smaller code changes, faster fault isolations, faster mean time to resolution (MTTR), more test reliability, and a faster release rate. All these will help you to improve your customer satisfaction.

Conclusions

Integration of DevOps culture can make a real difference in your start-up to deal with day-to-day dev issues. Well-architected infrastructure in the cloud, infrastructure automation, CI/CD, containerization, log management, continuous monitoring—everything influences your faster delivery, customer satisfaction and ultimately leads to success. It is crucial not just to use cutting-edge technologies; it is also vital to set up and leverage them properly. With the help of DevOps consulting services, start-ups can follow a transition process without causing any harm to their regular development cycles.

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DevOps is a popular work culture that allows the development and operations teams to work together to complete a development cycle at a faster pace than they used to do with traditional approaches.  There are multiple advantages of adopting DevOps including shorter development cycles, faster innovation, reduced deployment failures, and time to recover, improved communication and collaboration, increased efficiencies, and reduced costs.

In case of software development, along with a faster development cycle, security is a vital criterion. But to deliver software at high velocity meet the competitiveness in the current marketplace, it will be harmful to ignore security concerns. To focus on security challenges to deliver secure software, it is important to identify the flaws in the system that can lead to security gaps as a result. Here are some of the factors that are driving the urgency to integrate security into DevOps workflows:

• DevOps, and security teams each of them have their siloed system to communicate and perform.  Without a combined system for engineering, DevOps, and security teams that can help to scale tasks and updates, time-to-market and launch delays are common issues.
• Developers are using tools to do Application Security Testing (AST). As those are not integrated into the daily development environments, the whole process gets delayed and challenging to get done.
• Insufficient security process to the testing and deployment phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) is a blocker; it can hamper the development process, launch date, and compliance of any new project.
• A huge number of DevOps team members are not even trained on how to secure software adequately.

Synchronizing security into DevOps for better speed and secured workflow

Along with high-speed and always-on nature of DevOps, security is also an important feature. The one-time security inspection is not enough and its clear security’s role in DevOps needs to be upgraded. Integrating security into DevOps is very effective and can help to remove the roadblocks that delay the project completion and launch into the market. To close the gap between the security and DevOps team and accelerate the development, it is important to have both teams onto the same development platform. The security approach should not only focus on the technical aspects but also form the right framework that will be compatible with the business objective of the organization.

Integration of DevSecOps

Though security is an integral part of an organization, the introduction of a security framework is a crucial part of the DevOps process. Otherwise, the implementation of security will be unbalanced, which can hamper the speed and agility of the business. With the help of DevOps consulting services, the organization can follow a transition process without causing any harm to the development cycles.

DevSecOps is a set of practices that organizations prefer to incorporate to tackle ever-evolving challenges in security. DevSecOps endorses traditional security engagement to an active process of the software development life cycle (SDLC). The processes like continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) ensure the active testing and verification of code during the development process. Similarly, incorporation of DevSecOps conducts active security audits and penetration testing into agile development.

For optimal security of DevOps, the organizations need collaboration from multiple aspects of internal functions to ensure that the security measures are correctly implemented at all stages of the development cycle. To implement a suitable security framework, enterprises need to take equal care of development, design, operation, delivery, and support system to achieve a balanced system. Incorporation of DevSecOps throughout the DevOps workflow helps in balanced governance, and also helps to reduce cybersecurity functions like IAM, unified threat management, privilege management, code review, vulnerability testing, and configuration review. With such a framework where security is appropriately aligned with DevOps, the users will be able to attain a higher profit margin along with fast and secure delivery processes.

How DevSecOps facilitates security and compliance

Several useful practices come with DevSecOps that help to integrate security and audit capability as an in-built component. Some of them are automation, emphasis on testing, fast feedback loops, improved visibility, collaboration, consistent release practices, and so on. it will help the organizations to enjoy:

1. Secure from the beginning and throughout: Security will be integrated from the early stages of DevOps processes, similar to other tests run as part of your software delivery process, and this is a quality requirement in every development cycle. DevOps processes can incorporate automated security testing and compliance that helps in improving software quality. With DevOps, the organizations will also gain better visibility and control over the entire systems development life cycle. 

2. Secure automatically: Automatic tests and processes will help to reduce the risk of introducing security flaws due to human error. As a result, the tests will be more efficient and you can cover more ground. So if there is some error, it will become easier to pinpoint and fix.

3. Clear picture to everyone: This process will get everyone on the same pipeline and page by integrating security tools and tests as part of the pipeline to deploy their updates. Therefore, InfoSec becomes a key component of the delivery pipeline and the entire process.

4. Fix things quickly: With DevOps, you can accelerate your lead time, so you can develop, test, and deploy your patch or update faster.

5. Balanced governance: DevOps also streamlines processes across the pipeline to have consistent development, testing, and release practices. DevOps tools and automation measures can be configured to enable developers to be self-sufficient to accomplish the development process while automatically ensures access controls and compliance. In addition, DevOps also ensures that all instances across all environments including development, QA, or production, are identified, tracked, and managed by IT.

6. Enable one-click compliance reporting. With automated processes, DevOps can provide traceability throughout the pipeline, starting from code to release processes. This will enable you to have access to a ton of information that is automatically logged. So, with the DevOps system, your auditing becomes much easier.

Conclusion:

DevSecOps assists the organizations to achieve speed without compromising stability and governance. By implementing DevOps processes one can incorporate security practices from the start of the development cycle. It will create an effective and viable security layer for applications and business environments to ensure security and compliance in the long run.

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Like most businesses, you may also have at least a few workloads running in the cloud. Having a few applications on cloud may not necessarily indicate that you need to migrate completely to cloud. It is true that cloud migration makes your business systems more scalable, reliable and highly available. However, these are not just the only criteria that or considerations that will decide if cloud migration is for you.

A lot of factors need to be taken into consideration if this is your first cloud migration. You would need a deep cost-benefit analysis of various cloud service models and then evaluate the best strategy for your business. In this article, we would give a birdseye view of the major elements that need to be taken care of while undergoing the cloud migration.

Potential key benefits of migrating to cloud

Here are some general scenarios and the potential benefits of cloud migration.

1. Scalability

There comes a time when the traffic to your website increases tremendously. This could be because of a sustained marketing effort, word of mouth, press releases, success story getting published in high impact journals, etc. When the traffic increases suddenly and your infrastructure is not yet ready to handle that kind of traffic, there are chances of downtime. There are chances that you cannot scale resources on the fly. In such scenarios, moving to the cloud is a good choice.

2. Cost reduction

Instead of spending money on latest hardware, software or complex enterprise licensing, renewal and support fees, you should be able to cut down both capital and operating costs by using the resources of a cloud service provider.

The above representation by Gartner. The Gartner research on the impact of cost on cloud migration states that “ The research states that “cloud services can initially be more expensive than running on-premises data centers. [However, it also proves that] cloud services can become cost-effective over time if organizations learn to use and operate them more efficiently.” Gartner says that “The statement is backed by an example of workload migration for 2,500 virtual machines from an on-premises data center to Amazon Web Services EC2. The example TCO (shown in the figure above) shows an initial uptake in cloud costs and a steady decline as soon as organizations learn how to apply cost optimization best practices (as described in this other framework). The chart also shows how on-premises costs may have a long tail as organizations take time to actually shut down their data centers.”

3. Reduction of infrastructure overhead

If you are a software developer or a managed service provider, you would have come across situations where the client wants faster development and deployment and reducing the infrastructure overhead costs at the same time. Cloud migration would be an optimal solution in such cases

4. Geographic expansion of the business

If you want to expand to new geographies, setting up IT infrastructure at each location cannot just be expensive but time consuming as well. Additionally, you would need to hire staff at each location, buy the required hardware and software, etc. In some cases, you would need to have the knowhow of the regional compliance norms as well. This may not just be the case when you yourself want the geographical expansion of your company. At times, if you are a service provider, your client may want to expand to other geographies and ask you to manage this transition. In such a scenario, moving to the cloud might ease things to a great extent.

5. Streamlined Data Storage

n the current business scenario, there is an absolute overload of data. Structured and unstructured data are being bombarded through social media, IoT devices, enterprise applications such as ERPs, CRMs, web forms, etc. Depending upon your business, you may be required to store and present data for several years. This amounts to an ever increasing burden on your storage space. Cloud storage allows you to store data on the cloud through a cloud storage provider that manages and operates data storage as a service. The data is delivered to the end user on demand with just-in-time capacity and costs. This completely eliminates the need for companies to buy and manage their own data storage infrastructure.

The statistics below by T4 clearly shows the growing popularity of cloud storage:

As per T4 Labs Inc, “ The Cloud Storage Market is forecast to see continued strong growth in the forthcoming years as cloud adoption increases, and more enterprises embrace cloud-based and cloud computing services. The growth is primarily driven by increasing digitization of businesses and the exponential increase in data. Organizations are employing more mobile technologies, the Internet of Things (IoT), Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, and Machine Learning. This leads to large amounts of data generation. The data needs to be stored in servers with low-cost and high accessibility. Cloud Storage Services are rising as a cost-effective and flexible alternative to purchasing and managing a data storage infrastructure on-premises. Due to this, the demand in the Cloud Storage Market and Cloud Computing in general, is likely to surge considerably in the forthcoming years.”

6. Building a widely distributed development team

Finding better than average software developers remains a perpetual challenge for development companies. So, it is always important to tap talented developers that are geographically apart. Post Covid 19, this phenomenon of remote working has become even more indispensable. By moving application development to cloud and building a distributed development team, companies can reap the following benefits:

• Greater access to global talent pools
• Ability to form highly specialized teams for each project
• 24/7 project coverage with global schedules and global delivery models
• Flexibility to add contractors to scale up project coverage
• Diversity and inclusion leading to multicultural perspectives
• Cost savings on talent
• Cost saving on overhead expenses, such as office space

7. Disaster Recovery

Everything goes fine until a disaster hits the business. Therefore having a disaster recovery and business continuity plan is a must for every business irrespective of their industry. Having a remote disaster recovery location and a complete data center is not possible for small or even medium sized businesses. Neither does it make sense when cloud can be used as a solution. Cloud disaster recovery systems can be implemented very quickly. All large cloud providers have their own disaster recovery locations. So you’re always safe when your mission-critical applications are on cloud.

8. Software and hardware upgrade

Businesses do not want to run their critical customer facing applications, or even the internal applications, to run on outdated platforms. To offer the best customer experience as well as employee experience, periodic software and hardware upgrades are important. If you are with a reputed cloud provider, you do not need to worry about this. Once you have moved to the platform, all such upgrades will be taken care of and your business will always be running on the best technologies. Even if you want to upgrade your own hosted app, patches and upgrades can be much easily performed across all servers at different locations.

9. Capital Expenditure to Operational expense

Most cloud models are subscription-based. This automatically eliminates the need to pay huge amounts of money upfront. Moreover, there are no capital expenditures required to build an IT infrastructure. This means that the entire capital expenditure shifts to the operational per month or annual subscription models. Moreover, pay as you go or pay as you grow models help you to optimize your cost throughout the business cycle. You can reduce or increase subscriptions as per the business needs and put all subscription-based expenses to the operational expense category. This is a great way for startups to reduce their expenses and exposure to the risk of building over capacity.

People HR has explained this phenomenon with a very simple representation on their blog post entitled “SaaS VS On-Premise HR Systems: Pros, Cons & Hidden Costs”.

As per People, An Access Company, “ With an on-premise solution, your setup costs are almost always going to be a lot bigger. For that reason alone, if you don’t want to make a significant investment, you’re better off with an SaaS solution – you simply pay a subscription fee each month/quarter/year (depending on your provider), rather than ‘buying’ the software outright. However, that monthly subscription fee is almost always going to cost you more than paying the on-going licence fees for the software you have bought – so in that respect, an on-premise solution works out more cost-effective in the longer term. This isn’t where it ends, though – on-premise solutions come with a huge load of hidden costs that don’t show up on paper, and unless you have a very efficient way of handling them, you will normally end up paying significantly more with an on-premise solution than if you choose a hosted SaaS solution.”

We see that there are several benefits of migrating to a cloud platform. But as there are great and not that great sides of everything, there are some not so great sides of cloud migration as well. Let’s take a look at what are some of the potential risks of cloud migration.

Potential key risks of migrating to cloud

Here are some general drawbacks associated with cloud migrations.

1. Sensitive data and Compliance

As cloud offers clear advantages in terms of productivity, efficiency and cost savings, companies have embraced, and use, the cloud extensively. This has led to a complicated security dilemma between productivity, efficiency and cost versus protecting a company’s sensitive data. As part of their normal workflow, employees store sensitive corporate data in cloud apps. While doing so , they are completely unaware of the security or compliance risk this may create for their respective organizations.

SkyHigh Networks, A McAfee company, analyzed customer usage data from over 21 million users to identify the scale of sensitive data that’s stored in the cloud. One of the many insights from this analysis was that “16.2% of all the files uploaded to file-sharing services contain highly sensitive, and oftentimes, regulated data such as:

• Personally identifiable information or PII (e.g. Social Security numbers, phone numbers, home addresses, etc.)
• Protected health information or PHI (e.g. patient diagnoses, medical treatments, etc.)
• Payment data (e.g. credit card numbers, debit card numbers, bank accounts, etc.)
• Confidential data (e.g. financial records, business plans, top secret documents, source code, trading algorithms, etc.)”

2. Added latency

In order to secure data, many companies want internal users to connect with the company’s data center through conventional MLP networks rather than directly accessing the cloud. This involves latency and delays. A lot of companies are able to address this issue by moving to more sophisticated Software defined WAN (SD-WAN). But for many companies that still have traditional networking infrastructure, moving apps that need quick access to real-time data may prove rather challenging.

3. Cloud platform or vendor lock-in

The vendor lock-in problem with many cloud providers is the situation where you become dependent (i.e. locked-in) on a single cloud provider and cannot easily move in the future. If, however, you have to move to a different vendor, you would have to fork out substantial money. You may also have legal constraints depending upon the agreement you signed with the cloud provider. In essence, you are forced to continue using a cloud-based product or service regardless of the quality, just because switching away is not a viable option.

Conclusion

The potential key benefits of migrating to cloud are cost reduction, scalability, reduction in infrastructure overhead, streamlined data storage, possibility of building widely distributed development teams, quicker DR and BCP capabilities, etc. One of the major advantages of moving to the cloud is that by doing so companies can completely eliminate the large amount of capital expenditure in setting up the technology infrastructure. At the same time, there are some major drawbacks of cloud platforms. These disadvantages or drawbacks are related to the security of sensitive data, latency in the conventional networking infrastructure and vendor lock-in issues. Although there are some major drawbacks of using cloud platforms, the benefits certainly outnumber the disadvantages. If chosen carefully, a good cloud platform can completely transform your business by increasing productivity and efficiency; and by substantially decreasing the cost of operation.

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