The business benefits of DevOps and DataOps

Gary Hallam is head of global channel development at Delphix. In this article he answers some frequently asked questions about DevOps and DataOps.

Why is it important for organisations to move data more quickly?

Today, every company is a data company. The ability to aggressively leverage data as a core asset is as important to master as software development has been. Data has the power to fuel software development in order to drive new products and services and transform the customer experience.

Yet most organisations today struggle with even the basics of data — making do with stale or partial data that can take days, weeks or sometimes even months to deliver to software teams. But with modern DataOps practices and technologies, data delivery can be automated, made more secure, and managed self-service in a fraction of the time. When data is agile, organisations are able to create applications faster and more efficiently, while also reducing costs and better managing data risk and security.

What are the business benefits of faster dev cycles?

Agile development not only improves business timing for delivering results, but also streamlines software teams' workflows so that more time can be spent building and innovating rather than fixing or maintaining. For the business, that means improved software quality, fewer bugs and faster feature releases — which all adds up to more positive digital experiences for customers.

DevOps engineers have become expensive in recent years. How can organisations attract them?

DevOps engineer is one of the most difficult IT jobs to fill, according to CIO.com. In order to not only attract DevOps engineers but also retain them it's essential for an organisation to be able to articulate its own vision for software development. DevOps can mean different things to different people, and making sure your process and goals are aligned with future software team members is key.

Obviously, businesses should look for engineers who also have the right skills to match their needs. So, companies are increasingly developing and growing their existing talent into DevOps specialists.

What are the benefits of democratising access to data across the organisation?

Just as the democratisation of technology has transformed the way everyday people use digital services, democratising access of data can have a transformative business impact on an organisation. Today, access to data for developers, business analysts and data scientists is essential to accelerating and enabling app deployment on demand. It's the key to unlocking new business insights, operational efficiencies and technology capabilities — such as artificial intelligence or machine learning. Those who are most poised to capitalise on the next wave of innovation will be those who can deliver fast, secure and high-quality data across their organisation.

What problems can automation introduce into the process, and how can organisations avoid them?

While automation has become a core element of the modern DevOps playbook, for most organisations, automation has rarely been extended to the data tier. This can result in significant lag within the software development lifecycle. Common data workflows, such as provisioning new copies of data to developers, are still highly manual processes involving tedious handoffs between people and teams. This doesn't even take into account the time and effort required to make sure data is both secure and compliant.

A DataOps platform, like Delphix, combines data compliance with on-demand data delivery to solve this issue. It's the only data operations platform built for digital transformation and instantly provides data for software test environments, easily versions data like code, and automatically identifies and masks sensitive data values to eliminate data privacy risk, without sacrificing speed.

What are the business benefits of greater automation?

As data continues to grow in size, volume and complexity —  the need to become a data-driven business has become more important than ever in order to innovate and gain competitive advantage. Thus, it's now critical for enterprises to automate the delivery of secure, high-quality data. In doing so, organisations will be able to leverage real-time data insights to improve short and long-term decision-making and rapidly develop new services and features to delight their customers.

Gary will be speaking at our DeskFlix: DevOps virtual event on 30th June. Register today.

This is a sponsored article.

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• Topics
• DevOps
• Delphix
• Gary Hallam
• dataops
• automation
• DevOps