A clear scope of ambition, technology prowess, and a thirst for competitive advantage is needed for any organization to undergo digital transformation. Further, they must have what’s required to define their roadmap to scope, scale, and lead the initiative. Having these in place, any CIO or technology leader can lead a successful digital transformation. And that’s exactly what can be offered by incorporating cloud infrastructure and DevOps best practices into their organization.
Cloud & DevOps started floating in the business ecosystem around a decade back. And today, many organizations are implementing them to achieve operational efficiency, expedite the software development process, optimize scalability, reduce overall costs, and, most importantly, undergo a successful digital transformation.
But before deducing any conclusions, let’s understand what cloud infrastructure and DevOps are and their role in digital transformation.
Understanding Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud is at the canter of all digital transformation efforts. It’s been over a decade since the cloud entered the business landscape, and the effect it has had on their value is unquestionable. But before delving into the details of how beneficial the cloud has been for businesses, let’s understand what cloud infrastructure exactly is.
The phrase cloud infrastructure denotes the combination of software and hardware components like storage, servers, management tools, virtualization components, networking, and more. It encompasses everything that is required for cloud computing.
Cloud infrastructure plays a crucial role in digital transformation. With cloud infrastructure, businesses can create more digital transformation initiatives. It even enables businesses to build applications, collaborate, and analyze the same without having to invest in any type of infrastructure. You get the environment needed to take on any new initiative without needing physical hardware.
What Is DevOps?
Now that we know what cloud infrastructure is, it’s time we understand DevOps. As per Atlassian, DevOps is a set of practices, tools, and a cultural philosophy that automates and integrates the processes between software development and IT teams. Started in around 2007, DevOps is a movement or a methodology that is bringing about a change throughout the product development lifecycle. Implementing DevOps eliminates the siloed approach to development and operations and brings the two together to work collaboratively. This helps increase the speed and enhance the quality of software development.
Unlike the traditional software development lifecycle, where developers only write the codes and the operations team takes care of deploying the codes, DevOps brings about a cultural change to automate the entire process. There is no bifurcation or working in isolation, which usually leads to slower or poor-quality release. With DevOps, they work in collaboration, and products can be deployed and released in days instead of weeks or months.
A big part of DevOps is the involvement of modern cloud platforms. These can help in getting rid of any bottleneck or roadblock during the development or deployment of the products. Moreover, they can help reduce the overall time required for configuring the deployment environment. Since it’s all done on the cloud, the configuration can be pretty fast and accurate.
Role of Cloud & DevOps In Digital Transformation
Cloud and DevOps are certainly two crucial avenues that most businesses are exploring in the current scenario. And one of the many reasons why businesses are investing heavily in cloud & DevOps is to achieve digital transformation. But before that, let’s understand the concept of digital transformation.
What Is Digital Transformation?
In the broadest meaning, digital transformation is the use of new-age technologies to digitalize existing processes or automate new ones. However, instead of simply creating new processes, digital transformation allows businesses to make their processes faster and more efficient with the use of data and digital technologies. Basically, digital transformation is the realization that one can discover new and better ways of doing work with the use of new technologies.
So, how exactly do cloud and DevOps add to digital transformation?
Let’s find out.
How Cloud & DevOps Enable Digital Transformation?
The role of the cloud and DevOps in digital transformation is extremely important. Cloud infrastructure enables businesses to collaborate without any geographical barriers. Communicating, sharing data, collaborating with employees, and all of the things required for digital transformation wouldn’t have been possible without the help of external cloud platforms. DevOps, on the other hand, offers them the flexibility and agility to continuously improve and implement the automation best practices unhindered.
An outdated or soon-to-be-obsolete technology environment can restrict the execution of technology capabilities required for transformation. Similarly, having the right environment but not ensuring the cultural shift for continuous integration & continuous deployment can hinder the transformation or at least delay it by months. By investing in cloud infrastructure, businesses can add more functionalities without stressing if the environment would support the transformation efforts or not.
Further, cloud infrastructure offers businesses the flexibility to scale with any size of data required for assessing areas that can be transformed. Another benefit of cloud infrastructure is the security it offers. Undoubtedly, cloud infrastructure is way more secure than self-hosted servers. The cloud service providers like Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud add a layer of encryption to the data that makes it even more secure.
All in all, cloud infrastructure enables businesses the environment needed to scale unhindered. But businesses still need flexibility and agility to undergo a successful digital transformation. And that’s what the cloud can offer when combined with DevOps.
Every business undergoes a unique journey of digital transformation. They touch on different aspects of transformation- governance, automation, culture, continuous improvement, and more. However, all of this can be done by combining cloud & DevOps.
DevOps focuses on continuous improvement. It breaks down the social mindset of siloed infrastructure and brings about a corporate cultural transformation. It brings together the three fundamentals of any organization- people, process, and technology. By getting DevOps services, one can focus all three in the direction of digital innovation and transformation. With DevOps, it all boils down to maximizing productivity and speeding up the delivery and deployment of products through continuous improvement. In fact, it makes automation a preference while increasing flow, cutting down feedback, and promoting a continuous learning & improvement cycle.
Conclusion
Cloud & DevOps are essentially the two pillars supporting any organization’s foundation for digital transformation. With a comprehensive & well-sought-out strategy, one can easily use cloud & DevOps to fuel their digital transformation initiatives and succeed.
Both cloud infrastructure and DevOps can offer an arbitrary approach to function in times of unanticipated duties during software development and delivery.
Thus, helping in expediting the entire process. Furthermore, incorporating these technologies in your digital transformation endeavor can help achieve operational efficiency and scale their efforts without worrying about storage or performance. They can choose to have a public or private cloud or even have in-house or managed DevOps services based on their organization’s maturity in terms of technology.
And while both cloud & DevOps can successfully operate independently of the other, together, they form the successful combination powering and pushing any organization’s digital transformation initiatives.
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