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  • Survey: DevOps Haves Benefiting Over Have-Nots

    Survey: DevOps Haves Benefiting Over Have-Nots

    A global survey of 400 global IT executives and practitioners conducted by Longitude, an arm of Financial Times Group, on behalf of New Relic suggests organizations that have embraced best DevOps practices are starting to enjoy material financial benefits over rivals that have not yet made similar investments in modernizing application development processes.

    The survey finds 25% of respondents are leaders when it comes to application development, with 90% of those respondents identifying the development and deployment of more perfect software as a strategic priority. Over a third of those respondents report their organizations have seen a 10% more increased revenue over the last three years.

    Those same survey respondents have also adopted continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms (98%) and have made observability a key tenet of their software development efforts (94%).

    The survey also finds 77% of developer time on average among leaders is spent on innovation rather than on fixing issues. Leaders also find out about system and software interruptions via observability platforms (78%) versus needing to be informed by end users. A full 99% of leaders say they are able to quickly understand the results of changes to software, which also accounts for why leaders have fewer than five major software or systems outages per month (83%).

    Leaders are also more likely to have adopted chaos testing (77%) and automated remediation (89%). Three-quarters of leaders (75%) have an average resolution time of less than 30 minutes.

    On average, the survey finds leaders run 66% of their software and systems in the cloud, with a total of 96% having adopted a cloud-native approach to application development.

    The top barriers to greater cloud adoption for the leaders were reported as being security concerns and regulations.

    Buddy Brewer, global vice president and general manager for digital experience monitoring at New Relic, said more organizations today are focusing on applications that are most critical to the business, which includes digital business initiatives that enable organizations to engage customers during the current COVID-19 pandemic.

    IT organizations are also breaking up into smaller teams to enable them to collaborate more effectively when building and deploying these applications, he added. As organization dynamics change, Brewer said those small teams need access to a broad range of cloud-based tools to manage highly distributed applications.

    There’s obviously time for IT laggards to close the current DevOps gap between themselves and DevOps leaders. However, as leaders move further down the DevOps maturity curve, the gap between leaders and laggards appears to be widening. Many organizations in the wake of the pandemic have doubled-down a DevOps process that makes it easier for small teams to collaborate as needed.

    Of course, during the downturn brought on by the pandemic, not every organization may be able to make strategic investments in IT tools and processes. The catch-22 is that it’s even less clear is just how those organizations will recover after the economy rebounds if they are still dependent on archaic tools and processes.

  • How COVID-19 Has Affected Digital Transformation

    How COVID-19 Has Affected Digital Transformation

    The current COVID-19 pandemic may have changed the way many of us work and impacted productivity, but digital transformation marches on. With technology arguably more important than ever, digital transformation needs acceleration, and companies are beginning their journey with the cloud. That’s according to results from a survey by cloud service provider Ancoris and the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF).

    The survey, which was conducted in the UK by Vanson Bourne prior to the lockdown, is comprised of responses from IT companies and business decision-makers in digital transformation to understand how they were utilizing next-generation technologies and the cloud. According to the results, 80% said they had their digital transformation strategies at hand, compared to today. With the novel coronavirus putting more pressure and less time on these companies to plan, only 18% of them have a strategy in place. “The very survival of office-based organization has hinged on their ability to adapt and go remote as quickly as possible,” Ancoris CEO David McLeman noted, which is putting pressure on companies to pivot as quickly as possible.

    Before the lockdown, the cloud was considered a vital element of their digital transformation efforts for 25% of respondents in the business and professional services sectors, 23% in the public sector, 22% in retail and surprisingly low 19% of respondents in the financial sector.

    Among other key findings: twenty-eight percent of businesses already have their digital transformation strategies fully in place, while 54% have begun their implementation. Businesses are also seeing the importance of the cloud, as 93% of respondents said their companies use it in some sort of way. And 25% of respondents said that they don’t get enough assistance from partners in helping them make strides in digital transformation.

    McLeman emphasized the importance of having external partners now and after COVID-19. They play a “leading role” in helping companies digitize, he said, and will be an “increasing integral component on ongoing digital transformation” post-COVID-19.

  • Survey Finds IT Teams Rising to COVID-19 Challenge

    Survey Finds IT Teams Rising to COVID-19 Challenge

    In many ways, the COVID-19 pandemic has been the ultimate test for IT teams. The bulk of many workforces overnight became remote workers. Many of those end users are now starting to return to the office, but no one knows for sure if they will be sent back home again because of another flare-up.

    A survey of 519 IT professionals conducted by ManageEngine, a provider of IT service management (ITSM) software, suggest most IT teams have risen to the COVID-19 challenge. According to the survey results, 85% of respondents said they were equipped with the right remote-support equipment or were able to procure it quickly to enable a productive remote work environment. In addition, 83% of respondents said they believe IT will be better appreciated in terms of budgets, salaries and recognition in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis.

    Overall, nearly three-quarters (72%) said the ITSM tools continue to be effective despite remote work conditions. For example, 40% cited knowledge management as their greatest challenge, while just over 50% noted that prior to the pandemic Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies were non-existent in their organizations.

    In terms of mobile computing devices, only 32% said they were already providing them. Nearly half (47%) are now planning to provide them.

    Self-service support options aren’t being used by 28% of the organizations, and of those who do use them only 40% found they truly helped. Among the respondents who use chatbots for their self-service, 50% found them beneficial for remote support. Only 7% of respondents felt that the service desk wasn’t up to meeting the remote IT support challenges that the pandemic presented.

    In addition, only 40% said they are equipped to tackle the increase in security and privacy concerns that result from more employees working outside the office.

    Cloud services were also critical, with more than half of respondents (53%) saying such services helped their organization’s business continuity. However, 20% of respondents said they did not have a business continuity or disaster recovery plan in place for emergency situations. Among those who had them, 50% were happy with those plans. Almost a third (29%) of respondents admitted they did not do enough prior testing of their action plan.

    A fifth of respondents also noted shadow IT is impacting services and applications, while nearly a third said they were unsure.

    Pradyut Roy, a product manager for ManageEngine, said it’s apparent many IT organizations will need to update IT policies and processes in the wake of the pandemic. It’s also probable the IT environment will become more heterogeneous in the wake of the pandemic as, for example, more desktops move into the cloud, said Roy.

    In general, IT teams will need to adjust to a much more fluid IT environment. Many more end users will be rotating in and out of the office to enable organizations to comply with social distancing mandates. Regardless of what the new normal becomes, however, it should be apparent to all by now that IT will play a more central role in most business decisions from here on out.

  • Businesses Modernizing Apps in Wake of Pandemic

    Businesses Modernizing Apps in Wake of Pandemic

    A survey of 5,000 business decision-makers, IT decision-makers and app developers published suggests organizations are taking advantage of the crisis created by the global COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate the modernizing of apps using DevOps practices.

    Conducted by the market research firm Vanson Bourne, the survey finds 80% of respondents said organizations must modernize the technologies they use to develop and deploy software to be more successful. Nearly as many (79%) said their organization will not be able to deliver a best-in-class end user experience without successfully modernizing software development processes.

    In addition, 80% of respondents said embracing developer processes such as test and learn would enable organizations to work more effectively and efficiently.

    The survey also finds some organizations are not letting a proverbial good crisis go to waste. A total of 70% said they have good or excellent alignment between application development and IT teams, up from 64% prior to the pandemic. Alignment between business teams and application development (67%) and IT teams (67%) increased by 10% and 12% respectively since the start of the pandemic, according to the survey results.

    Sumit Dhawan, senior vice president and chief customer experience officer for VMware, said the need to make applications more accessible and reliable is accelerating a transition to the cloud. The survey finds the primary benefits of modernizing apps are enabling remote workforces (54%); pushing quick updates in response to changing landscape (42%); and maintaining reliable uptime (41%).

    The scope of application modernization initiatives varies widely. Some organizations are simply lifting and shifting existing application workloads along with the virtual machines they run on into the cloud. Others are refactoring applications to run natively on a different virtual machine platform provider by a cloud service provider. Others are wrapping existing applications in containers so they don’t have to be refactored when deployed on another virtual machine. Still others are employing containers and Kubernetes to develop entirely new microservices-based applications that tend to be more flexible and reliable than existing monolithic applications.

    Regardless of the path forward, the inability to physically access local data centers during the pandemic has accelerated a shift to the cloud that was occurring even before the pandemic hit. There still will be many applications that for performance, security and compliance reasons may need to remain in on-premises IT environments. However, it might not be long before IT organizations also modernize those applications to make them both more accessible, flexible and resilient.

    Most IT teams will find themselves managing microservices-based applications alongside modernized monolithic applications for years to come. Over time, however, many of those monolithic applications will be deconstructed into a core set of microservices.

    At the core of all those initiatives will be a set of best DevOps processes that each IT team defines for itself based on the nature of the application portfolio that needs to be developed, deployed, secured and maintained. The challenge now is determining which applications should be modernized versus simply replaced by either a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application or a custom cloud-native application that is a better fit for the purpose.

  • Survey Finds SRE Role Remains Largely Aspirational

    Survey Finds SRE Role Remains Largely Aspirational

    Monitoring tools provider Catchpoint, in collaboration with the DevOps Institute, has published a survey that finds there is a significant gap between the tasks and duties that define the role of what a site reliability engineer (SRE) should be versus what is actually occurring within IT organizations that have hired SREs.

    Based on a survey of 600 IT professionals who have SRE titles or individuals that identify themselves as performing SRE-like tasks, the “Catchpoint SRE 2020 Report” finds the bulk of respondents are still squarely focused on managing IT infrastructure.

    Google, which is widely credited with defining the SRE role, maintains SREs should be spending as much time managing applications as they do infrastructure. Survey respondents on average are spending 75% of their time on operations. Only 14% of respondents said they are spending 50% or more of their time on application development processes. More than have of respondents (53%) also noted they are becoming involved too late in the application life cycle.

    The Catchpoint survey finds the top three tasks survey respondents associated with their roles were monitoring and alerting (93%), dashboarding (73%) and managing infrastructure as code (71%).

    Catchpoint CEO Mehdi Daoudi said one of the most telling aspects of the survey is only 53% of respondents identify observability as a task associated with their role, even though that’s a core tenet for best DevOps practices. Further down the list of DevOps tasks were testing (41%), telemetry (38%) and chaos engineering (26%).

    Daoudi said it’s probable many IT organizations are adding SREs in anticipation of furthering their DevOps ambitions. Not every SRE has all the skills required, but as more of them gain hands-on experience it’s likely many will grow into those roles. In fact, 41% of respondents said half or more of their work revolves around mostly manual, repetitive tasks that could be automated. More than half of respondents (52%) said they spend too much time on debugging-related tasks.

    Part of the challenges many IT organizations face derives from not putting enough focus on automating the management of legacy IT infrastructure, said Daoudi. Every time a new platform is adopted there’s a rush to operationalize it. However, IT teams frequently overlook the need to automate the management of rote tasks to free up more time to learn how to manage new platforms such as Kubernetes.

    Going forward, the survey finds nearly 50% of respondents said they believe they will be working remotely post COVID-19. More than half of respondents also said personal challenges included staying focused and having a good work/life balance while working from home.

    The degree to which SRE titles are being adopted to enable IT professionals to justify a raise or simply pad their resumes is unknown. However, the focus on the SRE role is likely to increase in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. In theory, a single SRE should be able to manage all the tasks that previously might have required as many as 10 IT administrators. At a time when many organizations are looking to reduce the total cost of IT, the number of full-time employees required to manage IT environments has clearly become a major concern.

  • Report: Confidence in Digital Transformation Lacking

    Report: Confidence in Digital Transformation Lacking

    Results of a recent survey conducted by the Corporate Board Member Institute shows a majority of respondents see their organizations’ digital transformation efforts aren’t keeping pace with the current business environment.

    The survey polled more than 200 directors of public companies in February, before the global COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, and the results were compared to PwC’s 2020 Global Digital IQ survey. The results show a lack of confidence in digital transformation initiatives—3 out of 5 respondents admitted their company is behind in their digital transformation processes and within the past three years, only 54% had begun their digital transformation processes.

    The PwC survey, however, shows the opposite: According to those results, 70% of U.S. executives said their digital transformation is ahead of their competitors. That 70% of executives compared to 35% of directors shows executives are more positive in their company’s progress and maintain a goal-oriented view, said Paula Loop, leader of PwC’s Governance Insight Agency.

    The optimism by executives shows that they have confidence in their ability to get things done with digital transformation now, and that they are planning for what is in the present and the near future. The results from directors show a longer-term view—while things currently might not look so good and they say they are behind, they still have the confidence that they can make strides in improving their digital transformation. Directors still believe that they are on or ahead of schedule in other areas such as integrating new technologies into products and services (70%) and training workers for the digital era (67%).

    In interviews conducted post-survey, after the pandemic hit, some directors said COVID-19 will accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. “Regardless of where companies were in digital planning, this pandemic has thrust most, if not all, into some form of digital transformation,” Loop said.

    Even when faced with a global pandemic, the business continues. Competition isn’t slowing down; it’s time to see whether digital transformation processes will follow suit.

  • Report: SD-WAN Shift to the Cloud Accelerates

    Report: SD-WAN Shift to the Cloud Accelerates

    The rate at which software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) are being consumed as a cloud service appears to be accelerating in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    A global survey of 750 IT professionals conducted by the market research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Barracuda Networks finds over half of respondents (52%) are looking to acquire an SD-WAN solution via a cloud provider, with Microsoft Azure being cited as the most preferred option.

    Only 16% said they prefer an SD-WAN from an independent vendor, while 15% would opt for a telecommunications provider. Another 12% said they would rely on a reseller.

    Klaus Gheri, vice president of network security for Barracuda Networks, said the survey suggests that as application workloads move into the cloud, more IT organizations want to centralize acquisition of networking services alongside compute and storage. As such, he said, providers of SD-WAN appliances such as Barracuda Networks will need to evolve to extend the basic SD-WAN capabilities provided by cloud service providers.

    At the same time, Gheri noted that way applications are being accessed is also evolving as more employees are working from home. Rather than directly accessing applications running in a local data center or office, many organizations are routing access requests to those applications through their cloud service provider. That approach reduces costs by using a public internet connection to access to cloud service, which then routes that request over a virtual private network (VPN) to a local data center.

    Given the egress charges a cloud service provider requires, that approach may not reduce costs in the case of every workload. However, it may reduce costs by reducing the amount of network traffic moving across a leased MPLS line, he noted.

    Gheri said the rise of the cloud as a networking conduit illustrates how varied SD-WAN implementations have become. Organizations increasingly need some capability at the client level to automatically determine which network path makes the most sense for any request based on cost and latency requirements.

    In the meantime, frustrations with VPN clients continue to mount. Most VPN implementations were designed to support a small percentage of employees for occasional access. With more employees working from home more frequently, many organizations are reconsidering their SD-WAN strategies. In addition to being able to scale services more easily, Gheri noted SD-WANs also afford organizations the opportunity to implement zero-trust networking services to better isolate application environments in the event of a security breach.

    Over the last few years, SD-WANs have been one of the fastest-growing categories in IT. The Barracuda survey found 23% of respondents have already deployed SD-WAN, with another 51% either in the process of deploying or expecting to deploy one within the next 12 months.

    Clearly, competition between cloud service providers, telecommunication carriers and independent providers of SD-WAN services will intensify in the months ahead. The challenge facing IT teams now is determining to what degree they want to be directly involved in managing SD-WAN networks versus simply consuming SD-WAN services on an as-needed basis.

  • Survey Sees Increased Agile Adoption During COVID-19

    Survey Sees Increased Agile Adoption During COVID-19

    A report published by Digital.ai, the parent company of CollabNet VersionOne, finds 43% of organizations have increased their reliance on agile application development methodologies in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with 15% saying it has increased significantly in the last 90 days.

    The report also notes 33% of respondents say they have increased or expanded Agile adoption in the last 90 days to help manage distributed teams, while 55% said their company plans to increase the use of agile in the next 12 to 14 months.

    Based on a pair of surveys conducted prior to and after the pandemic started, the 14th annual “State of Agile” report also finds 60% of respondents credit agile methodologies with having helped increase speed to market, while 58% say it has improved team productivity. Another 41% say they are also better able to manage distributed teams.

    Mike O’Rourke, chief research and development officer for Digital.ai, said there is a clear correlation between the ability to manage distributed application development teams and successfully navigating the pandemic now that most application development and deployment teams are working from home.

    Many of those teams are also seeing application development deadlines being moved up as organizations prioritize digital business transformation initiatives that now are core to any business continuity strategy.

    That shift is also accelerating a shift toward focusing more on business metrics for measuring success as defined by, for example, the Scaled Application Framework (SAFe), said O’Rourke, noting as a result, there’s also a lot more focus on value stream management across the enterprise as business and IT teams work closely together. The survey finds just over half of the respondents report their organization has either already implemented value stream management (VSM) or are planning to do so.

    The survey also finds more focus on risk and compliance, with the number of respondents identifying and measuring technical risk prior to deployment increasing 54%, while the importance of automated audit compliance and governance across control points increased 10% year over year.

    Perhaps most surprising, the survey finds reducing project cost is cited as an important reason for adopting agile by only 26% of the respondents, a 41% drop from the previous year. The number of organizations focused on release planning decreased by 11%; however, organizations focusing on product road mapping increased 9% over the previous year. The survey also finds slightly more respondents are using automated acceptance tools (3%). Another 12% said they plan to adopt agile project management tools in the future.

    It’s not clear whether increased focus on application development might result in bottlenecks when it’s time to deploy those applications. Organizations that have already embraced best DevOps practices alongside agile development methodologies will naturally be in a better position to deploy applications. At the same time, increased focus on digital business transformation is likely to accelerate the adoption of both agile development methodologies and best DevOps practices across the enterprise.

    In fact, it’s arguable that organizations that are not able to build and deploy applications adroitly may soon find they are unable to compete at a time when software development has become critical to their survival.

  • AppDynamics Survey Sees Rush to Digital Transformation

    AppDynamics Survey Sees Rush to Digital Transformation

    A survey of 1,000 IT professionals in organizations with annual revenue of at least $500 million conducted by AppDynamics, a unit of Cisco Systems, finds nearly three-quarters (74%) report digital transformation projects which typically would take more than a year to be approved are now being signed off on in a matter of weeks.

    The research also finds 95% of respondents changed their technology priorities during the pandemic, with 88% identifying digital customer experience as being a priority now.

    In addition, some 71% said some digital transformation projects have been implemented within weeks versus the months or years it would have taken to implement a similar initiative before the pandemic. At the same time, 66% of respondents noted the pandemic has exposed weaknesses in their digital strategies, creating an urgent need to accelerate initiatives.

    Not surprisingly, the survey also finds 81% of respondents said the pandemic has created the biggest technology pressure their organization has ever experienced, with 61% under more pressure at work than ever before. Almost two-thirds (64%) said they are now being asked to perform tasks and activities they have never done before.

    Despite the enormous pressure technologists are facing, 87% said this period of time is an opportunity for technology professionals to show their value to the business. In fact, 80% of survey respondents report that the response of their IT teams to the pandemic has positively changed the perception of IT within their organizations.

    The survey specifically identifies managing spikes in website traffic (81%), lack of unified visibility and insight into the performance of the technology stack and its impact on customers (80%) and managing mean time to resolution (MTTR) with a remote IT department (70%) as major challenges.

    IT teams during this time need clear goals and objectives (90%), real-time data at the point of need (89%), autonomy and accountability (88%) and the freedom to experiment and take risks (87%), the survey finds.

    Angie Mistretta, chief marketing officer at AppDynamics, said the survey mirrored an earlier AppDynamics report that tracked a rise in the use of search terms such as “digital experience monitoring” and “application performance management (APM).”

    In general, Mistretta said it’s also apparent the rate at which application workloads are moving into the cloud is accelerating as organizations look to deploy more resilient applications based on cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes that are designed from the ground up to access remotely.

    It may take time for IT organizations to master cloud-native platforms to deploy microservices-based applications. As such, the number of monolithic applications being lifted and shifted into the cloud remains considerable. Once those applications are shifted, many IT teams will only then start to modernize those applications.

    Naturally, AppDynamics is betting many more organizations will require access to an APM platform to navigate this brave new world of legacy and emerging digital business applications in the cloud. The challenge for IT teams, however, is there have never been so many APM options available.

  • GitLab Survey Sees DevOps Gains as Developers Exercise More Control

    GitLab Survey Sees DevOps Gains as Developers Exercise More Control

    A global survey of 3,650 software professionals published by GitLab respondents indicates developers are exercising more direct control over IT environments.

    More than a third of respondents (35%) said developers define and/or create the infrastructure their applications run on, with 14% actually monitoring and responding to infrastructure events. Additionally, 18% of developers instrument code for production monitoring, while 12% serve as an escalation point when there are incidents.

    More than 25% of developers reported feeling solely responsible for security, while 33% of security team members say they own security. A total of 29% said they believe everyone should be responsible for security.

    A quarter of respondents said their organizations have been practicing DevOps for three to five years, while 37% said they have been practicing for one to three years. Nearly 60% of respondents said their organizations deploy code either multiple times a day, once a day or once every few days, a 15% increase over the previous year.

    Brendan O’Leary, senior developer evangelist for GitLab, said that massive jump in the number of organizations capable of deploying code at faster rates indicates many more organizations are starting to move further along the DevOps maturity curve. For example, the survey finds 70% of developers can now provision their own IT environments.

    Well over a third of respondents (38%) said their DevOps implementations include a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform. Almost 59% of those surveyed use GitLab, while 23% use GitHub and 11% use BitBucket. For builds, 60% use GitLab and 38% use Jenkins. A total of 29% said their DevOps implementations include test automation, while 16% said they have embraced DevSecOps.

    Almost 40% of survey takers said they “partially” use microservices, while a quarter (26%) said they fully use them. Well over a third (38%) have also adopted Kubernetes.

    Despite that progress, however, the survey makes it clear there is still much work to be done. More than 42% said testing still happens too late in the life cycle. In fact, 47% identified testing as the top DevOps bottleneck for the second year in a row. Only 12% said they have completely automated testing.

    When it comes to security, well over a third (36%) find it hard to understand, process and fix any discovered vulnerabilities. About a third (31%) said prioritizing vulnerability remediation is still an uphill battle.

    O’Leary said when it comes to security the most challenging issue remains determining what vulnerabilities to prioritize alongside a long list of other bugs and issues that often need to be addressed. Cybersecurity teams all too often continue to send developers a list of vulnerabilities they have discovered with no context, he noted. Many developers are only made aware of an issue after their code has been merged, which O’Leary said makes it more difficult for them to address a specific security issue.

    It’s not clear any organization will ever achieve complete DevOps nirvana. However, as organizations become more proficient it’s clear the return on investment in DevOps is starting to be achieved as more organizations deliver code faster. The challenge now, of course, is making sure the right secure code is delivered at the right time.