From Risk to Opportunity: Unlocking Organisational Success Through Effective DevOps Practices

From Risk to Opportunity:

Unlocking Organisational Success Through Effective DevOps Practices

Minimise Financial Risk and Enable Innovation by Leveraging Our Cutting-Edge DevOps Maturity AssessmentContents

Take your first steps towards faster, more efficient, and more effective project lifecycles, with your company goals at the centre of everything.

From Risk
to Opportunity:

Unlocking Organisational Success
Through Effective DevOps Practices

Introduction

Today's business landscape is increasingly complex, and successfully navigating its shifts means identifying the right focus areas for improvement. Many organisations increasingly find that success hinges on the implementation of robust IT infrastructure and processes. However, organisations frequently spend millions on IT infrastructure, but shy away from investing in applications, software, configuration, or business continuity (even if such investments are smaller than the costs already committed). But this false economy frequently leads to problems with security, privacy, regulatory compliance, and customer value.

Fortunately, DevOps – the systematic adoption of mature application practices, based on the convergence of software development and operations – offers a proven, transformative methodology in this regard. Once these principles are properly embedded at all levels, IT can be effectively aligned with organisational goals, laying a solid foundation for long-term success.

Exponential-e's DevOps Maturity Assessment is the first step in this regard, offering a swift initial evaluation, guidance for immediate enhancements, and ongoing support to help your organisation develop and maintain mature DevOps practices.

In this paper, we will explore the underlying principles behind the assessment process, ensuring it delivers the greatest possible business benefits for your organisation and – in turn – your customers.

From concept to delivery:

the foundation of effective DevOps practices

The consequences of immature DevOps practices can be disastrous. Organisations may face security breaches, privacy violations, non-compliance penalties, and strategic failures – all leading to significant financial losses. Many of these risk factors involve failure to adhere to a range of increasingly complex regulatory obligations, but fortunately, this is an area in which mature DevOps excels.

Every IT project must have a comprehensive and robust process that ensures that all relevant requirements are captured, and – critically – that they are implemented. Mature DevOps streamlines this process by incorporating security by design, privacy by design, compliance by design, and so on while also testing every build to ensure that requirements are met, and transparent governance protects against human error.

It’s not just a question of how project requirements are expressed and organised, but the rigour in establishing the set’s completeness – the flow through to the ‘design’ and ‘test’ phases – that determines whether DevOps initiatives are successful.

Now, let’s look at each of the key risk factors in more detail…

Streamlining compliance processes

Compliance is very much a DevOps issue, as it’s all about creative collaborative teamwork to identify requirements and find ways to satisfy them. While organisations must consider a range of regulatory obligations, depending on their sector and locations, let’s consider data privacy – a critical concern in an evolving threat landscape.

Any firm holding and processing personal information in the UK or EU is subject to the rules of GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation). The fine for non-compliance with GDPR is up to £17.5million, or 4% of worldwide turnover for the year, whichever is larger. But this isn’t the only regulation organisations must be aware of. For example, under the Californian Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) penalties can be even larger than GDPR as the fine is $7,500 per violation. In other words, if you have an email harvester that collates Californian emails and a bad actor gain access to those emails, then the penalties may easily dwarf that GDPR fine. While negotiated settlements may be smaller, increasingly harsh penalties are being established to ensure organisations meet their obligations.

Data privacy, which includes compliance with the eight rights and seven principles of GDPR, must be carefully considered as part of any effective DevOps initiative. Factoring this into all systems and processes, while ensuring best practice is followed at all levels, will significantly streamline the process of achieving and maintaining compliance, helping avoid costly financial penalties and reputational damage.

Developing a true cyber security culture

Ransomware attacks remain an ongoing concern for organisations large and small, across industry sectors. At the time of writing, our many customers in this space tell us that such attacks are growing in frequency at over 60% PA, and the trend shows no sign of reversing. This is made even more complex by the growing speed of digital transformation across both the public and private sectors, with everything from retail to entertainment, banking, and critical national infrastructure increasingly exploring the potential of the Cloud. Importantly, each new innovations creates a number of new attack vectors that must be identified and secured.

There are numerous consequences to a breach, easily costing millions even if you are insured. Firstly, there is the loss of business. Even with a top recovery team, it can take at least five days to recover, leading to a significant loss in revenue. Then there is the damage to the share price, loss of customer goodwill, and the cost of restoring IT infrastructure and recovering any data was lost, including inflight transactions. There is also the potential yet common cost globally of simply paying the ransom demand to release the data. Several nations have made it illegal to pay such demands and impose fines on organisations who do – which can be yet another cost of the breach. Finally, in an era where the delivery of critical services nationwide increasingly relies on the underlying IT infrastructure, the knock on effects up and down supply chains can be further amplified.

For this reason, mature DevOps factors in ongoing teaching and coaching on current cyber security best practice, both in terms of preventing ransomware attack and ensuring infrastructure can be restored and secured as quickly as possible in the event of a breach. This means disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) systems and processes are another key element of DevOps maturity, working on the principle that ‘it’s not if, it’s when’.

Due to the evolving nature of cyber security and the ever-increasing complexity of corporate infrastructure, this hardening will require the input of dedicated specialists to supplement organisations’ internal capabilities. By drawing on both the lessons learned from recent breaches and advancements in cyber security ecosystems, best practice becomes very much an organic process that is factored into every stage of every project, and eventually, a key part of the wider company culture.

Embracing intelligent automation

Finally, we come to the more subtle, but by no means less important, improvements arising from mature DevOps. Automation invariably provides at least a 10% improvement in IT projects’ efficiency, performance, and productivity. Learning how to write precise instructions to programmers is typically another 10% so they deliver exactly what you need and nothing else. Rapid road-block removal is a typically a third major pool of savings, where strong teamwork and broader collaboration can make seemingly impossible obstacles just evaporate.

For example, instituting regular code inspection by both humans, in the form regular peer reviews, and combining this with automated code scanning yields huge benefits. Code review and unit testing on an ongoing basis will prevent errors from affecting project deadlines. It will also ensure they are not allowed to detract from either the security ecosystem or the user experience.

As another way of looking at this, take a standard DevOps team, which is usually made up of about seven people per sprint, often utilising a mix of on-shore and off-shore resources.

Let’s look at the typical cost of such a team:

Senior Developer – £120K
Developers – £90K x 3
Offshore Senior – £60K
Offshore Juniors – £40K x 2

Such a team thus costs over half a million per annum, so a 10% boost in productivity (from any one of the three pools just covered, more than justifies a £50K spend. Put simply, any investment delivering a 10% or greater improvement in productivity costing under £50K is a good investment. If it costs less to achieve, or the outcomes are greater, then even better.

But that’s just the beginning. Automating routine processes as part of good DevOps practices will improve productivity, shorten the typical time-to-market, improve product quality, and offer employees greater job satisfaction, as they will be free to focus on the organisations newest, most exciting innovations. And the cherry on the cake is the compliance-privacy-security risk mitigation that inevitably delivers a tectonic shift in business continuity, disaster recovery – although harder to quantify this BC rationale can be the justification.

Conclusion

When we consider these different risks, and the opportunities that are unlocked when organisations are willing to challenge them, automation and code review alone will more than justify the initial investment. And that’s before we factor in the key DevOps areas of privacy, security, business continuity, and investor confidence.

As is hopefully clear at this point, when DevOps practices are embedded at all levels of an organisation, the focus can naturally shift from avoiding risk to embracing innovation and opportunity, with new solutions brought from concept to delivery as seamlessly as possible.

However, this all depends on organisations’ readiness to honestly consider their current level of DevOps maturity and take steps to remedy any weaknesses that are uncovered. Our DevOps Maturity Assessment represents the first stage of this journey… One that we hope we will be able to join you on, as your own DevOps culture emerges.

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