As businesses are becoming more and more competitive, organizations have to keep updating their applications and software to satisfy changing customer needs. But, if left uncontrolled, constant code changes can result in errors, security vulnerabilities, and reliability problems. This is where DevOps and DevOps services come in. DevOps practices combine software development and IT operations to shorten the software delivery cycle and produce high-quality software. Managed DevOps services take the DevOps burden off your team’s plate by enabling expert teams to plan and execute your DevOps strategy, allowing your in-house staff to focus on core products rather than infrastructure management. By implementing managed DevOps, you can transform your organization through the acceleration of release cycles, continuous delivery, and reliability. In this article, we discuss the top benefits you can reap by implementing managed DevOps services.
Faster Time to Market
This is one of the reasons why organizations deploy managed DevOps services to reduce the software development life cycle and release new features faster.
Managed service providers use the latest DevOps tools and automation to streamline their workflows. For instance, they can assist in setting up CI/CD pipelines to automate build, test, and deployment processes. It gets rid of delays between development and operations teams and enables rapid iteration.
As a result, you can condense months of effort into weeks or even days. Your organization can deliver updates and new functionality to customers faster, outpace competitors, and respond quicker to market demands.
Enhanced Innovation Velocity
In addition to faster time to market, managed DevOps fuels innovation velocity inside your organization. For instance, organizations adopting DevOps practices report an increase in deployment frequency, enabling more rapid iterations and feature releases. Developers stay focused on coding without infrastructure distractions, and more releases drive concrete feedback and improvements.
Managed service providers handle tasks like provisioning test environments and configuring pipelines. This allows your developers to concentrate on writing code rather than waiting for infrastructure. It also facilitates experimentation with new capabilities and quick iteration based on user feedback.
Higher application release velocity means collecting more customer insights per cycle. Combined, these effects let your organization maximize developer productivity, increase innovation, and accelerate improvements.
Improved Product Quality
Faster delivery and iteration are only worthwhile if product quality remains high. Managed DevOps enables both speed and reliability through extensive automation and testing. Organizations leveraging DevOps practices experience a 68% reduction in change failure rates, ensuring that rapid deployments do not compromise quality.
Steps such as code scanning, security checks, performance testing, and code review are automated by service providers. This moves the testing left in the development cycle before it reaches customers so that defects don’t reach customers. Also, these quality checks can be automated, giving developers quick feedback while integrating.
Additionally, DevOps teams that are managed use practices such as shift left testing, infrastructure as code, and continuous integration. These processes further drive quality assurance earlier while eliminating environmental inconsistencies. The result is faster delivery of new features without compromising stability, security, or user experience.
Enhanced Platform Security
Application and infrastructure vulnerabilities can severely impact brands in today’s marketplace. Managed DevOps services apply several practices to bake security into the development lifecycle.
Service teams constantly scan infrastructure and code for potential issues using SAST, DAST, and IaC scanning tools. Embedding security analysis in pipelines catches problems early before release. Providers also conduct manual penetration testing and remediation to check for oversight gaps.
In addition, they enforce security measures within the development workflows. Practices like reviewing dependencies, enforcing coding standards, and separating environments promote the development of secure application architectures. Together, these automated and manual checks identify vulnerabilities early and ensure you release highly secured software.
Continuous Delivery Pipeline
A core practice underlying managed DevOps is creating a continuous delivery pipeline. This automated workflow eliminates manual steps between developers’ coding features and deployment into production.
Service teams design pipelines integrating tools like source control, build servers, quality checks, and release management. Code commits flow through each phase without delay or human intervention, only stopping on failures. This consistent process enables rapid development iteration and reliable, low-risk releases.
With continuous delivery in place, organizations can deploy large and small updates multiple times per day. The streamlined workflow and safety checks let teams implement new features faster without stability tradeoffs.
Increased Operational Efficiency
While enhancing development velocity, managed DevOps also improves operational efficiency. Service teams leverage practices like infrastructure as code, containerization, and policy as code to optimize cloud infrastructure.
For example, they codify infrastructure configurations and implement them through automated pipelines instead of manual processes. This reduces configuration drift and inconsistency by declaring the desired state in files tracked under source control. It also allows infrastructure changes to match application updates through code.
Containerizing applications similarly bolsters consistency and efficiency. Containers include all app components and dependencies instead of relying on underlying hosts. This improves portability across environments.
Lastly, policy as code techniques like using Ansible, Terraform, or AWS CloudFormation to define policies prevent infrastructure from deviating from best practices. Configurations stay compliant without constant review.
Together, these practices minimize configuration headaches, keep infrastructure consistent, and provide version-controlled changes. Teams manage infrastructure through code in a streamlined and efficient manner.
Reduced Costs
The efficiencies, automation, and cloud utilization driven by managed DevOps services all help optimize infrastructure and decrease costs. Service teams right-size architecture needs and leverage auto-scaling groups to minimize waste. Streamlining the development lifecycle also reduces human maintenance and monitoring overhead. Automating manual tasks further lowers repetitive management costs over time.
In addition, improving release velocity and innovation output boosts productivity, which translates directly into revenue gains. Accelerating customer feedback loops also prevents wasting resources and improves features that lack demand.
While saving costs in operations and infrastructure, managed DevOps also maximizes product output. These combine to deliver a compelling ROI on your DevOps investment.
The Benefits of Integrating DevOps Support Services
In addition to the core managed DevOps practices discussed above, organizations can further improve agility, productivity, and innovation by integrating supplemental DevOps support services into their working process.
These specialized offerings extend expert management into related IT functions surrounding the DevOps lifecycle. Tight alignment creates end-to-end automation and oversight without gaps between teams.
DevOps support services bring key benefits like:
- Maximized Productivity – Comprehensive managed services reduce cross-team delays that sap productivity. Tight collaboration, common processes, and shared metrics streamline efforts.
- Improved Innovation – Holistic visibility and planning break down silos across IT functions, speeding feedback and idea sharing.
- Enhanced Agility – Cross-functional teams with aligned objectives can pivot faster on business needs without overhead.
- Lower Risk – United requirements, testing, and security improve release quality and prevent defects.
By leveraging managed DevOps support teams for adjacent needs like cloud, security, and testing, organizations gain better ROI along with faster outputs and delivery.
Integrated teams also provide complete oversight and optimization instead of isolated gains.
Key DevOps Support Services
- Managed Cloud Services
- Managed Security Services
- Software Testing Services
- Managed Cloud Services
While DevOps automation and practices optimize the development lifecycle, cloud infrastructure still requires expert configuration, scaling, security, and governance. Managed cloud services provide an extension of your DevOps team to architect and manage underlying cloud platforms.
Cloud admins seamlessly integrate with DevOps pipelines for infrastructure provisioning and deployment. Shared metrics and planning prevent cloud sprawl, misconfigurations, and policy violations that cause outages and add costs. Cloud and DevOps teams collaborate on right-size architectures and ensure optimal performance.
Managed cloud services also overlay availability, backup, security, and access controls following best practices. Adding cloud administration and oversight capabilities augments in-house staff and capabilities.
Managed Security Services
Application and infrastructure vulnerabilities remain top threats to organizations. Augmenting DevOps capabilities with managed security services adds dedicated defensive security specialists.
These experts perform penetration testing, remediation, and 24/7 monitoring beyond DevOps team capacities. Tight integration also enables shifting security left by embedding code scanning, user access controls, and policy enforcement directly into CI/CD pipelines.
Managed security services to boost risk protection through hands-on participation in DevOps testing and release workflows. Security teams provide an essential failsafe for detecting gaps before vulnerabilities reach customers. Their specialized skills and overhead monitoring act as a force multiplier for internal IT staff.
Software Testing Services
Delivering innovative capabilities faster requires more testing earlier, more automation, and more collaboration between developers and QA. Adding managed software testing services brings these dedicated testing roles alongside DevOps engineers for alignment and shared metrics.
Testers contribute deep expertise in creating test automation frameworks, building simulation test beds, and developing advanced techniques like shift-left testing. These skills augment in-house DevOps staff focused on infrastructure and pipelines.
Together, integrated DevOps and testing teams create comprehensive test coverage while preventing quality gaps or bottlenecks. Testing experts also provide essential feedback to developers and contribute UX insights from running user acceptance tests.
By uniting software testing and DevOps under one umbrella, organizations gain end-to-end automation with cross-functional collaboration. This drives higher quality and faster delivery of new capabilities.
Conclusion
Implementing managed DevOps services provides measurable improvements in release velocity, efficiency, cost, and quality by applying automation and cross-domain collaboration. Integrating complementary managed services for cloud, security, and testing multiplies these gains for an even greater business impact.
With comprehensive managed services, organizations can innovate faster, build higher-quality software, and embed security everywhere. Development and operations teams gain the support and expertise needed to implement leading practices fine-tuned to business objectives.
The result is transformative application delivery, reduced risk, and optimized infrastructure. Productivity, innovation, and capabilities all scale exponentially thanks to managed services filling skill and bandwidth gaps.
By selecting integrated managed service providers with deep DevOps and IT operations expertise, technology leaders can finally make this collaborative culture and its benefits a reality in their organization. Partners combine strategy, technical skills, and automation to unlock rapid outputs, efficiency, and innovation your business needs to outpace disruption.