Why You Should Use DevOps To Improve Your Business

Written by: Kevin Gardner

For a world where businesses are increasingly going online, it's essential that you have the right tools to ensure that your business can perform at top capacity. For everything from optimizing communication to quicker time to market, DevOps is the best possible path to putting your best foot forward competitively. The following points will help you to understand just why DevOps is the missing key to unlocking your business's full potential.

Improved Collaboration

DevOps strikes a necessary balance between business needs and resulting IT changes, making it the best tool possible to ensure that your business can leap into the future without fear of losing key components. Leaving behind old IT practices can be difficult, but using DevOps will help your company to create a software farm that can compete in the current market.

As the name suggests, DevOps helps Development and Operations teams to collaborate, and share goals. By using DevOps Tools to communicate more efficiently and on whatever platform you're already using, such as Slack, you'll be able to more easily avoid potholes and kinks in your product pipeline. In order for innovation to be possible, it's essential that your teams are able to avoid reworking an existing product, freeing them to focus their attention on future products. Your teams will also gain skills that will be helpful across many disciplines, rather than simply learning how to do one task in their current department.

Speedy Delivery

In this day and age, having the best and newest product does not guarantee that you'll be a success. Instead, one of your top priorities should be optimizing your systems for speed and efficiency. In a market that demands ever-increasing speed of release for new products, DevOps allows businesses to decrease their "time to market", meaning you can achieve greater output in even less time by using this technology.

By using proper practices, you can create a pipeline that is integrated and speedy, and will be able to identify any hitches along the way much more efficiently. You can improve the quality of your code, recover more quickly from failed attempts, and eliminate any superfluous processes. Reducing your business's time to market is essential for staying at the top of the game, whatever the industry.

Product Consistency 

Speed alone, however, will not be enough to make consumers satisfied with your product. It's equally important that your product is consistently the highest quality possible, and DevOps can assist with this as well. Particularly in cases where a product needs both cloud integration and on-site installation, the collaboration between Development and Operations is essential for ensuring quality consistency throughout the process.

Because of increased simplicity in communication, it's much easier for the product to undergo testing at every stage of production, and have baseline requirements before proceeding to the next step. Automation for various parts of the process will now become possible, freeing up time for work on other aspects of the project. Adding new features will no longer be a risk for existing ones. This way, you can ensure that your product will come out of the DevOps process ready to go.

Overall Agility

The last three points all combine to create a process that is, overall, much more agile. It will perform with speed, with consistent quality, and will improve all aspects of your business. In this way, DevOps acts like a coach to an Olympic athlete, helping your business reach its full potential without sacrificing any of the necessary features, and making your teams happier, more flexible, and more motivated to help bring your company into the future.

Investing the time into DevOps now may seem like a stretch for your business, particularly if you're still using older IT practices. But if you're not already behind the market now, without the ability to create new and more efficient pipelines, you soon will be. By adopting DevOps practices, you will be able to achieve the goals necessary to bring your business into the future.

Related: How To Support Your Engineering Team