More than 50% of firms have already implemented DevOps

Posted on 17 Jan 2018 by Jonny Williamson

Organisations are increasingly turning to DevOps within their development and database teams, according to a new survey.


Organisations are increasingly turning to DevOps within their development and database teams – image courtesy of Depositphotos.

The new Database DevOps Survey 2018 has revealed, that 82% of the 700 organisations asked say they have either already adopted DevOps or plan to do so in the next two years, up from 80% in 2017.

Over half (52%) have already implemented DevOps process on some or all of their projects, a jump from 47% last year.

However, a significant number of laggards are turning their backs on DevOps. While 60% of respondents in the retail and IT Services industries are already using DevOps, less than 40% of those in the government/education and not-for-profit sectors have adopted it.

And, over a third (36%) say they have no plans to implement DevOps within the next two years.

More than 60% feel positive impact 

The research also pinpoints the benefits that DevOps is delivering, and it shows that 63% of those surveyed feel that DevOps has a positive impact on regulatory and compliance requirements – a vital issue given the forthcoming EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), with its 25 May 2018 deadline.

Image courtesy of Depositphotos.

This rises to 69% among those who have already adopted DevOps – showing that the further down the implementation path organisations are, the greater the compliance benefits.

Databases are increasingly central to business operations, with over a third (35%) of organisations deploying database changes either daily or more than once a week.

This is reflected in the key benefits that respondents see from adopting database DevOps – 28% say that increasing speed of delivery is the biggest advantage, up from 26% in 2017, followed by freeing up developers and allowing them to handle more added value work. This is cited by 23% of people in 2018, a big jump from last year’s figure of 17%.

Skills shortage to be biggest challenge to adopting DevOps 

Skills shortages are the biggest challenge to successfully adopting DevOps, identified by 24% of respondents, followed by disruption to existing workflows and the business (20%).

The survey found that DevOps is increasingly seen as a business priority – just 12% cite lack of awareness of the business benefits as the main obstacle to adoption, a fall of a third from 17% in 2017.

However, 40% of the laggards who have no plans to adopt DevOps blame a lack of awareness of the business benefits as their main challenge, demonstrating a need to educate management on the advantages that DevOps brings.

However, while the majority are pushing forward with DevOps, a significant proportion risk being left behind, missing out on the advantages this new way of working delivers in an increasingly data-driven world.

What actually is DevOps?

DevOps (a clipped compound of “development” and “operations”) is a software engineering culture and practice that aims at unifying software development (Dev) and software operation (Ops).

The main characteristic of the DevOps movement is to strongly advocate automation and monitoring at all steps of software construction, from integration, testing, releasing to deployment and infrastructure management.

DevOps aims at shorter development cycles, increased deployment frequency, more dependable releases, in close alignment with business objectives.

Source: Wikipedia