Do you DevOps?

In today’s increasingly digital business environment, large enterprises are constantly seeking ways to be more agile, more secure. In the IT community, the challenge is no different. IT operations are finding that, in order to keep pace with growing data requirements and increasing competition, that they need uncover inefficiencies and drive optimization in organizational software. Thus, we at Axway ask the question: Do you DevOps? Perhaps, more specifically, are application-to-application file transfers covered by your DevOps?

What does DevOps mean in theory?

DevOps is a group of IT concepts that have been created to increase the coordination between enterprise operations and software development. The idea behind DevOps is simple–make IT agile.

In the digital era, the ability to improve business capabilities and rapidly address new business opportunities is correlated to the ability to be fast in improving, developing and deploying software. To achieve that, there is a need for intense collaboration between software developers and IT operations teams. Up until the recent era, software developers and IT operations have had diverging perspectives and goals. Typically, software development has been under more pressure create agile development schedules, while IT ops have been more focused on maintaining a working status quo. Now, that’s changing.

Native digital actors’ success is based on the ability to generate and support an automated collaboration model between the two teams; allowing each of them to achieve independent goals. That is the root of the DevOps. Today that practice is invading established organizations worldwide and allowing IT ops to scale with the innovative software development sector.

Making big companies, fast companies

Since DevOps is software-based, DevOps is changing everything by giving IT the foundational building blocks to develop and modernize the tools of their organization in real-time. Essentially, DevOps are tools for “Agile Operational Software Development” that allow for simultaneous use and development. The user/developer feedback loop in expedited and constant, increasing advancement and limiting times of potential system failure as a result.

Oops–system error!

Applications are not stand alone. They each provide a critical function within the enterprise operation and depend on an interconnected mesh of communication. Whether it is a CRM, related database or a cloud-sharing mechanism, you cannot change one without dramatically affecting the others. Very often, those interconnections are file transfer based. At Axway, we know that 80% of the file transfer failure is related to an application change within the organization. In other words, even if the application change followed a complete DevOps process, there is an increased risk that an iteration could result in a business disruption.  This is certainly something to focus on considering that an average of 32% of critical business processes relies on file transfer today[1].

Shine a light on your blind spots

Most of the time inter-application connections are not documented, not managed and not visible. Therefore, potential failures to critical business operations are not deemed important until they become and actual failure that limits the benefits of the DevOps initiative. To avoid this, there are a few questions, that if answered, can save a lot of time, money and heartache.

Is your file transfer infrastructure ready for DevOps?

What are the questions to ask when you have file transfers supporting your business processes?

• Is there a complete, up to date repository of existing inter-application file transfers?
• Is there a repository containing application manager contact information?
• Are all file transfers register as server-to-server file transfers or are they register as inter-applications connections?
• Is there a way to find out if a change to an application will have an impact on others? If yes, what?
• Is there an alert mechanism and dashboard to monitor file transfers in real-time?
• Is there a way to automatically intergrade a new configuration of the file transfer mechanism with the new version of associated/connected applications?
• Is there a central management solution that can be included within the DevOps framework through APIs?

Support a DevOps Culture

A DevOps culture is a culture that is built around agile operations and constant improvement. Learn more about how Axway is supporting the DevOps culture with MFT.

MFT: ready for digital