The Rise of DevOps Managed Services: Why They Matter
Modern businesses rely on technology to remain functional, competitive and, in some cases, even viable. The role of software and mobile applications has substantially expanded over time. Businesses must keep up with a constantly evolving, progressing and expanding technological landscape to maintain pace with both their competition and consumer expectations.
The fact that technology progresses at an incredibly fast pace creates significant challenges for businesses. It’s difficult to consistently have to revisit software systems to ensure they’re up to par. In this article, we’ll take a look at what DevOps is, its significance in today’s tech landscape, along with how DevOps managed service providers provide a solution as well as the benefits your company can enjoy when partnering with an MSP.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a word derived from “software development” and “operations”. It refers to the holistic practice of software development professionals collaborating and communicating with information technology professionals to develop software for businesses to use. Instead of teams working independently of one another, DevOps establishes one team. They’ll take an idea and use it to plan, develop, deliver and operate systems, right from the beginning and continue throughout the software development life cycle (SDLC) and beyond.
This approach eliminates silos while integrating and combining cultural practices, philosophies and tools to help a company better deliver applications. The collaborative efforts of the DevOps approach greatly improve upon the SDLC and help speed up the build of software and application products, increase and improve quality assurance, strengthen the company’s security posture and, ultimately, put a business in a better position to serve customers and competitively position their brand.
The Role of DevOps Managed Services
In today’s tech landscape, the DevOps approach is increasingly having a transformative impact on software development, deployment and collaboration. By partnering with a reliable third-party DevOps managed services provider, a company can enjoy the benefits of DevOps’ collaborative philosophy without needing to make the large investment involved with hiring personnel, along with acquiring tools and overhauling processes. Key components of DevOps (and managed DevOps) include:
- Automation
- Continuous integration (CI) of code changes
- Continuous delivery (CD)
- Infrastructure as code
- Source code management
- Containerization
- Monitoring
Since a managed service provider (MSP) is completely invested in providing tech-related services, they won’t get distracted or burdened by other aspects and areas of business. An MSP’s services are their core competency, which enables the MSP to be 100% focused on their service – in this case, the entire SDLC. The result for an MSP’s customers is streamlined processes, automation and continuous integration, effectively eliminating what has historically been the sluggish transformative process.
Benefits of Investing in DevOps Managed Services
In a world where a large percentage of transactions are done through websites, apps and other technological methods, you need to offer quality experiences and transactions. As a result, software development and maintenance are now major components of a business strategy and need consistent staffing to manage them.
Not unlike accounting, sales, cybersecurity and other critical business processes, software development and operations are not a task modern businesses can afford to divert resources away from or put off. Yet, by the same token, it is difficult for today’s businesses to keep up with the pace of technology.
Instead of having to expand upon capital budgets (without knowing how much you’ll need), investing in continuous training and developing a pipeline of skilled and experienced talent to contribute to either software development or operations, you can pay a predictable fee to a DevOps managed services provider. Your managed DevOps services provider will take care of all your needs. Benefits your company will derive from partnering with an MSP for DevOps include the following.
Greater Cost-Efficiency
Working with a managed DevOps services provider means they’ll cover the costs for a fixed, agreed-upon, predictable monthly fee. As a result, you can lower your labor costs and relieve your company from needing to invest in the resources required for development and operations. Along with this, you get the ability to mitigate and, even sidestep, the whole problem of costly employee turnover. The arrangement made with an MSP is perfect for companies without large budgets or needing to operate with predictable costs.
This also means you won’t have to incur expenses every time something breaks or has delays due to staff members leaving. You completely eliminate the problem of not having someone immediately available to take the reins and continue working on projects and products. Your MSP will always have the skilled personnel you need for the continuity of your products. You can’t beat the cost-efficiency associated with outsourcing DevOps.
Strengthened Collaboration
When internal teams come together, even with the intention of promoting collaboration, it can be difficult to overcome individual biases or perspectives. As a result, communication sometimes breaks down or a project is stalled.
Working with a third-party managed DevOps expert makes it easier to remove these elements. Your partner’s neutral perspective and focus on improving core delivery metrics make this possible. They’ll work directly with you to gain input and then work on delivering products according to your company’s specifications, goals and objectives.
Streamlined Development
With a dedicated third party at your disposal for the DevOps role, you can rest easy your development is in the hands of an expert team that is completely focused on your project. Unlike internal teams which may be pulled in multiple directions when juggling IT issues, your projects will be automated and streamlined and remain on schedule.
As a result, you can count on continuous integration thanks to your managed DevOps services provider. You can also expect unified results with each product, since your provider will have professionals working with one another to catch errors, update code, or make tweaks to increase efficiency and productivity.
Accelerated Development Cycles
Many MSPs have pre-designed solutions they can customize to fit your company’s requirements. This makes the development cycle move far more quickly than starting from scratch. However, even if you do need a customized solution, your dedicated managed DevOps services team can still work quickly and efficiently to accelerate your development cycle and deliver a solid product.
Consistent and Better Deployment Experiences
MSPs employ teams who are focused on accuracy, quality, efficiency and consistency. DevOps managed service providers put an emphasis on quality, which includes running product testing to catch errors, identify bugs, or finding potential vulnerabilities.
This helps make for a seamless deployment experience, reduced failure rates and reliable products. Ultimately, you don’t have to worry about releasing products with defects hidden within the code and your users will have a seamless experience.
Efficient Resource Usage
Working with a DevOps MSP means you can rely upon their resources instead of having to handle the details on your own. With the efficient processes they employ, your internal staff and teams can focus on other important aspects of your business. As a result, your company can focus on expansion and innovation.
Why Businesses are Relying on DevOps Managed Services
Simply put, in addition to the numerous above benefits businesses enjoy by investing in DevOps managed services, modern businesses are increasingly relying on DevOps managed services to also gain access to enhanced agility and accelerated innovation. Adopting a DevOps approach means making significant changes in an organization, which can be initially challenging.
- Making cultural changes
- Eliminating silos
- Building trust between developers and system administrators
- Aligning technology with business process requirements
- Realigning job roles and responsibilities
- Building DevOps expertise
- Potentially adding burdens to current IT staff
Organizational change is hard, and people typically don’t embrace change. Some actively resist it. When businesses opt to go with a DevOps managed services provider, they essentially sidestep many of these challenges and can go right to a turnkey solution. Outsourcing your DevOps means you don’t need to hire a full team, and you’ll also gain:
- Proactive monitoring and issue resolution
- Improvements in efficiency and productivity
- Acceleration of time to market
- Reduction of manual tasks
- Minimization of system downtime
- Enjoying a primary point of contact to streamline the process
- Seamless ability to adapt to industry and market trends
- Better mean time to recovery
- Scalability to meet current and fluctuating demands
- Flexibility to expand or decrease the level of services needed
- Stronger levels of security and assured compliance
- And much more!
Today’s businesses find outsourcing an array of IT processes to be a valuable opportunity. DevOps is not an exception. It offers companies unique opportunities to meet business objectives while simultaneously reducing their weaknesses and vulnerabilities.
What to Look for When Seeking an Managed DevOps Services Partner
At Red River, we know it’s important for you to identify a partner who appreciates and recognizes your business, culture and objectives. When selecting a DevOps managed service provider, your ideal partner should understand your specific business requirements. Other factors to consider when selecting an MSP include:
- Costs and pricing models
- Provider capabilities
- Track record of successes
- Experience working with your preferred platforms
When a business considers adopting DevOps managed services, like any other partnership, it needs to find the right fit. Talk with your provider to ascertain whether they are equipped to cater to your company’s specific needs.
Interested in Exploring DevOps Solutions? Red River Offers a Seamless Experience
Outsourcing DevOps is a great opportunity to leverage the expertise of your provider while meeting your business objectives and creating quality products. The advantages of working with an experienced and knowledgeable partner to manage certain business processes, especially where IT is concerned, are tremendous. Your MSP can help you grow your company, provide top-notch software and technology experience and help poise your company to gain a competitive advantage in your industry.
As a full-service managed IT service provider, Red River understands the requirements and needs of companies. Our professional team of experts possesses the skills, resources and manpower to bring your ideas and business needs from conception to fruition.
If the idea of investing in DevOps managed services sounds like a good solution for your company, or even if you’re on the fence and want to learn more, the experienced team members at Red River are happy to answer questions or provide any additional information you need. Contact us today and we can get the conversation started.
