To stay competitive in the age of digital disruption, enterprises are maneuvering to harness strategic insights from their growing data silos. Data has a greater role to play in the future dominance of businesses. This data (which is often untapped) continues to grow at an exponential rate as Artificial Intelligence, IoT, Machine Learning are adopted across business parlance. The dynamic businesses of today require data integrated digital platforms that offer the twin goals of agility and resilience which calls for a radical change in business operations. This demands a shift from the legacy way of functioning to the new agile business units in a matter of weeks. The need is to be constantly innovative to make informed decisions that keeps the business much ahead of the competition
It is well known by the C-Suite that all of the tech tools in the world cannot replace the communication within their inter-departments. The siloed working across cross functional teams further restricts enterprises from reaping the benefits of business intelligence. This calls for an integrated platform that brings operations and development teams together. Welcome to DevOps, a wonder term for custom software development that blends technology and operations to streamline the project delivery life cycle.
Harnessing Operational Efficiency from Data Pipelines
Big Data comes from multiple sources and harnessing this data for operational efficiency can be a mammoth task. Drift in data pipelines can harm the end-to-end monitoring that multiplies the time-to-resolution. Data privacy is another risk that may increase compliance concerns arising from data whereabouts, combined with frequent changes in IT infrastructure.
Business Intelligence (BI), in contrast, uses data batches to drive intelligent analytics. The success of a BI implementation can only be measured to the extent it is deployed and used by the employees, which leverages the tangible benefits bought to the enterprise.
Both Big Data Analytics and Business Intelligence depend on current data pipelines that defines its output quality. It is this ‘collaboration’ which forms the core of DevOps, one that is focused on improving operational efficiency, architectural agility and engineering productivity. This in cohesion improves business confidence and trust in data pipelines.
Assuring Data Sanctity with Automated Testing
The traditional BI approach utilizes data in batches for analytics and insights. This practice loses data sanctity and freshness once when it is processed. Adopting a DevOps approach would mean automating testing multiple data sets simultaneously thereby keeping them ‘current’ which can prove to be extremely beneficial when handling multiple data sources. Businesses would be able to harness situational awareness to detect errors before they jeopardize the entire IT systems. Moreover, this gives more time to fix issues before reaching the production stages when they can become more problematic.
The lacunas put forward with the sanctity that surrounds data pipelines forms the premise of the modern data architecture. The alacrity in execution makes DataOps with BI and Analytics a sought-out combination. Both DevOps and Business Intelligence (BI) have been deployed over the years as separate entities by businesses to further their reach, but when combined, they bring colossal advantages that business must harness for enhanced productivity and efficiency.
Data-Driven Decisions backed with Continuous Delivery
The power to control and visualize continuous delivery pipelines and optimize execution releases from planning to production becomes critical to the modern software factory operation. Continuous delivery, offered on the cloud drives actionable DevOps analytics, multi-app release planning and management, intelligent continuous testing, and integration across the application lifecycle. To enable a more integrated continuous delivery pipeline, businesses can make data-driven decisions in real-time once the releases are instrumented with continuous delivery.
When project planning is underway, DevOps is a perfect fit for software, automation, and collaboration. ‘Automate everything’ forms the key principle of DevOps. Automation starts when developers come up with the code, and continues when this code is pushed into application, subsequently the application is automatically monitored along with the system in the production phase.
DevOps improves data analytics allowing interdepartmental teams to automate software-based aspects of data analysis process. The entire DevOps process brings integration, testing, deployment, and application performance monitoring together in a continuously automated live environment. Thus, DevOps practices are heavily dependent on automation which make deliveries in continuum across different platforms over a matter of few hours.
Automation in DevOps fosters the principles of reliability, speed, accuracy, and consistency. As a balancing act, automation initiatives also let businesses enhance developers’ productivity by managing other requirements across the cross-functional projects thereby reducing failure risks. This eventually leads to Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) with scalability and compliance standards in place.
Improving DevOps KPIs
Application delivery and efficiency can be improved when, most of the standardized DevOps operations can be automated. The secret of effective DevOps lies in automating as many mundane, time-consuming, repetitive jobs workflows that are possible and practical accompanied with fewer risks.
DevOps automation comes with its advantages most prominent being reusability of components by multiple team members in numerous circumstances. Take test automation, for instance, where a developer can write unit tests that are activated automatically when an updated code is bought into a live environment. These tests can run on need basis and can be updated to accommodate new requirements.
Going Forward
Summing up, a successful DevOps environment requires a wide range of initiatives and tools that businesses would need to automate infrastructure, monitor systems, integrate security and development cycles to manage database releases. A victorious DevOps environment is designed to fit the dynamic needs of businesses and improves seamless application delivery for operational excellence.
However, business enterprises have multiple choices of vendors that support DevOps application delivery. On need basis, businesses must look out to incorporate change management and take advantage of the technology that is at their disposal.
Although DevOps has proven to be a valuable strategy, there is no one-size-fits-all approach that answers DevOps implementation. However, going forward, businesses must understand that each DevOps implementation is unique and must be customized to meet the specific project requirements.
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