Sponsored Content

Sponsored content is a special advertising section provided by IT vendors. It features educational content and interactive media aligned to the topics of this web site.

Home > Convergence

How DevOps Can Ease the Enterprise Cloud Experience

As organizations move toward increased reliance on cloud services, especially hybrid cloud adoption, they’re finding that DevOps can be instrumental in achieving compatibility between legacy software and new platforms. In general, the advantages of cloud adoption include rapid provisioning, efficient go-to-market resources and raw compute power, which enable companies to gain a competitive edge. From scale-up and scale-out potential to high availability (HA) and disaster recovery solutions, the cloud offers a level of parity that allows smaller companies to compete against large enterprises.

Increasingly, cloud computing is helping to drive business innovation. DevOps goes hand-in-hand with that innovation by offering an effective approach to software development and operations. Within an organization, DevOps brings a new level of collaboration between developers and IT to transform business and operational processes.

For example, increasing numbers of companies are finding that DevOps provides end-to-end accountability for software development, effectively breaking down traditional silos of responsibility. In the past, different sourcing partners and discrete teams were tasked with each stage of software development, QA and testing, then software solutions were handed off to operations for deployment, monitoring and troubleshooting. DevOps ensures high-quality software outcomes by eliminating those silos and bringing together organized, self-sufficient developers with operations team members who are responsible for managing tightly structured and scheduled environments.

But for most companies, capitalizing on these innovations requires organizational transformation, business process reform and internal cultural changes. For example, the unapproved apps and tools that business users routinely download to help meet production goals can seriously threaten organization-wide security. DevOps can transform the responsiveness of IT by working proactively to balance tool delegation and management before problems arise.

Another key outcome of the relationship between developers and operations pertains to areas of overlap. Greater collaboration only increases the level of shared knowledge, which ultimately enables DevOps to build a better overall system. However, in the era of cloud services, knowing how cloud-enabled apps introduced by business users can work synergistically with pre-existing tools remains a persistent challenge.

New apps need to be compatible with legacy solutions, and this only becomes more complex with the rise of hybrid environments. Such systems are often comprised of on-premises tools, public infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) compute, and software as a service (SaaS) business applications. The goal of DevOps becomes how to ensure seamless functionality and high performance for the business end user.

Cloud Storage: Three Use Cases for CIOs

Storing data in the cloud can save money and time. But what are the issues related to performance, security and control? The answers depend on what use cases you are considering: backup and archiving, primary data storage or file sharing and collaboration. Gain insights into the benefits and challenges for all three.

Download Now

As mentioned previously, transforming a business with cloud resources and DevOps requires business process reform and culture modifications. But choosing an effective partner to help transition to cloud requires a provider that understands that the journey includes more than IT and infrastructure change. IBM SoftLayer provides the core IaaS platform under IBM’s Bluemix PaaS for developers. By offering bare metal alternatives in addition to VMs, the company provides not only speed and high performance for applications, but also a level of consistency unattainable with virtual machines (VMs).

Moreover, the IBM SoftLayer cloud has been fully integrated with VMware’s virtualization stack, which enables current VMware customers to instantly build hybrid clouds. Increased workload mobility and application continuity are important features that can help businesses move toward cloud adoption. For organizations with business-driven, dynamic IT environments, DevOps principles and practices offer the most efficient way to navigate the challenges of transitioning to the cloud.

Disaster Recovery
Data Backup
Data Center
Sustainability and ESG
Close