In today’s competitive world, Software organizations are expected to innovate and deliver exceptional user experiences constantly. Moreover, they must deliver on the key competitive advantages at a disruptive pace. Hence, enterprises are turning to DevOps, often touted as the best means to champion innovation.
However, DevOps is easier said than done. There are implementation challenges, and the continuous innovation you plan on delivering might take a lot of time to be considered ‘continuous.’ Things might not pan out as you thought. Building your DevOps capacity could be an extremely time-consuming process. Challenges such as people’s resistance, meeting technology needs, skilled workforce requirements, etc., are common. Moreover, even if your DevOps implementation has been completed, you might struggle to get the desired tangible results. Good luck if your management wants you to deliver on your DevOps initiative in the first six months!
Want some stats and numbers to get a better picture of this scenario? Here’s a sneak peek into the study conducted by Embotics and Ponemon. As per this study, lagging in DevOps could cost an average enterprise around $34 million annually. However, with almost 70% of IT leaders showing little confidence in managing risk in the cloud and only 33% capable of quickly delivering DevOps enablement, can organizations escape the humongous loss, as quoted by Embotics and Ponemon? This is where DevOps Managed Service Providers come into the picture.
How Managed Service Providers Boost DevOps Transformation
Simply put, MSPs accelerate DevOps to meet the pace of technology changes. It’s unimaginable for IT companies to complete DevOps transformation at the annoying and disruptive pace at which technology evolves. In times when solutions become obsolete extremely quickly, you need something that can help you transform the otherwise cumbersome DevOps implementation process. Enter DevOps Managed Service Providers or MSPs.
MSPs eliminate the entire process (and the stress) of DevOps implementation. They also help organizations set up DevOps automation tools, train employees, and even initiate a cultural transformation. An MSP will also help you with cloud maintenance, workload management, infrastructure, security, and 24/7 support if required.
As such, a DevOps Managed Services provider significantly speeds up your DevOps initiatives. By helping you create fully automated continuous delivery processes, MSPs help achieve the desired, direct impact on business efficiency, performance, and innovation. Moreover, due to automation, your company witnesses considerable cost reduction and improved speed in solution delivery.
How Managed Service Providers Add More Value to Businesses
We’ve established that DevOps is time-consuming, and its implementation can be too much of a task. It could spell a lot of expenditure for small and medium-scale companies too. Therefore, for SMBs, it is wise to outsource their IT operations.
On the other hand, companies that have already adopted a DevOps culture needn’t do away with it. Instead, you can still utilize MSPs to pace up DevOps transformation for your business. And, in case you think this would mean surrendering all control over your IT culture to a third party, think again. Not all MSPs work that way. Termed DevOps-friendly MSPs, these professionals find a middle ground and operate completely transparently, working in sync with your in-house IT team.
Your business is likely to get more value and benefits out of managed service providers in terms of:
Reduced cost: You lower your labor spend, minimize turnover, don’t have to invest in training, and get to leverage automation. All of this helps you reduce your cost tremendously. So, if your technology budget is unpredictable, you don’t have skilled IT personnel to invest in, or you are scarce on resources, hire an MSP. In such a scenario when security and downtime can become serious problems for your organization’s growth, MSPs can help you keep up on delivering innovative solutions.
Improved processes: With a cloud-managed service partner, attaining DevOps solutions like continuous integration and deployment becomes simple and quick. With solutions like these, software development steps such as testing & deployments can get automated, which would have taken months to complete. Moreover, if you don’t have the right people in-house, errors are highly likely to be reported even post the testing phase.
Another key area that MSPs are proficient in is data management. Once lost or stolen, precious data can be tough to recover. But if you store all your data on the cloud, you can better manage and protect your data. You will experience minimal to zero downtime, which is a big advantage considering that an hour of downtime costs a small business about $8000 and a large business approximately $700,000.
Automated processes and updates: DevOps automation has added speed and accuracy to every task, from documentation to optimizing business processes. With automation to your rescue, you complete every work in fewer steps, in less time, and with high accuracy. That’s how leveraging automation and DevOps-managed service providers lend their clients the flexibility and scalability to deliver innovative solutions at a lightning pace, with minimum error rate. Tweaks and customizations don’t need to keep waiting, either.
Improved speed: One of the first things that will catch your attention when you hire an MSP is the significant increase in speed at which things get done. As everything runs on the cloud, even the provision of servers is quick. Your cloud service provider can tackle any issue from any network. All this wasn’t possible in the case of traditional services. This way, MSPs also ensure better protection from outages.
Focus on Core Business: A professional and reputed DevOps-managed service provider will always work towards helping you meet your business challenges. Top DevOps-managed service providers focus on building the right mix of private and public cloud and on-premise IT. With MSPs taking up most of IT planning, implementation, etc. work, you can channel your time and effort towards strategic business growth.
Conclusion
Businesses of any size that are looking for DevOps transformation must think about leveraging the many benefits that an MSP can bring in. However, you must exert the utmost care while selecting the right DevOps-managed service provider who understands your exact challenges and requirements.
At Rapyder, we believe that first understanding the key requirements of DevOps is core to building strong solutions. This is why we start by measuring past performance and establishing future goals based on KPIs and your business vision. Thereon, we help you fill the performance gaps that exist. Alongside ensuring fast performance, error minimization, and improved efficiency in your DevOps initiatives, we emphasize bringing down the humongous IT costs related to DevOps implementation.
[Read Next: DevOps Case Study: TIX Achieves 30% efficiency in software release cycle ]
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