Today's business environment is marked by rapid changes and the need for constant innovation. When there are pressures to achieve more with less, and an ongoing demand for IT to get closer to and move in pace with the business - IT leaders can no longer afford to ignore the efficiency and excellence gains of DevOps untapped. 

What does DevOps mean for your IT teams

As much as it was true for DevOps in engineering, shifting to DevOps in IT management means more than just a set of new tools; it requires building a culture that prioritizes teamwork, ongoing innovation, and continuous improvement. From a practical standpoint it involves, among other things:

• Viewing all your enterprise applications stack as part of a cohesive system, which should adhere to the same principles and operate towards the same goals 
• Encouraging a broad, engineering-like mentality among administrators
• Creating uniform processes and using the same tools across applications for better consistency and efficiency
• Adopting automation and agile methods to increase velocity, adaptability and response times
• Building a KPI framework to measure your organization’s progress and the effect of your process changes on your team and, in turn, the impact of IT on the business on the whole. 

The short term and long term benefits you will reap

Streamlining collaboration and efficiency

DevOps encourages teamwork across different departments, breaking down barriers between teams. This collaboration is crucial for making workflows more efficient and solving problems faster. DevOps promotes a culture where everyone shares responsibility, helping to complete projects more quickly and efficiently. 

Fostering continuous improvement and innovation

The repetitive cycle of DevOps pushes teams to constantly assess and enhance their processes and applications. This not only leads to more innovative solutions that align with customer needs and market changes but also ensures applications are always improving and staying ahead.

Boosting application quality and reliability

Through practices like continuous testing and monitoring, DevOps significantly raises the quality and reliability of applications. Integrating quality assurance from the start helps catch and fix problems early, reducing the chance of issues when applications are live.

Reducing time to market and resolution time

A key benefit of DevOps is its ability to shorten the timeline for releasing new features or applications. Automation in the build and deployment stages allows companies to quickly bring value to their customers - internal and external. In the context of IT teams this means better supporting and aligning with the requirements of the business, becoming true partners in advancing operational excellence. 

Start your DevOps journey without jumping off a cliff

Embarking on a (sometimes painful) journey of process and methodology changes has to have tangible and meaningful benefits for it to be worthwhile. The journey also has to have an achievable goal with an actionable plan - concrete steps that allow for a learning curve, along with immediate successes which motivate and garner support to keep going - both within the IT organization and among outside stakeholders. 

Using Salto, your team can achieve immediate improvements in application configuration management and start moving towards a DevOps mentality in the delivery of your IT services. Time to value will be very short, ensuring you build the motivation and support required to continue on the path of adopting DevOps for IT. If you’d like to learn how to put in place DevOps principles and methodologies - please reach out to us here to schedule a call. In the meantime, we have some practical resources for you to take your enterprise application teams to the next level: Here are some helpful resources for your Jira team to start with, and here is the relevant information for your IAM team. With support of more and more enterprise applications to come (Confluence, Google Worksapce and more) - be sure to stay tuned.