To fully participate in the digital economy and stay ahead of customer expectations, enterprise IT must deliver software faster than ever before. As a result, Agile development and DevOps processes have become critical for IT to meet the challenges of the digital world. Those processes give enterprises flexibility, enabling them to pivot as needed to meet changing conditions and get software out the door more quickly.

But each enterprise takes its own approach to software delivery, and often, teams within those enterprises operate at a different speed and manage unique dependencies. “Typical enterprise IT can be described as a highly-regulated, hybrid IT environment containing a mixture of geographically dispersed waterfall and agile teams that support both legacy systems and new apps. Large enterprises have hundreds of apps deployed across many different environments and are in a constant state of change,” says Mark Levy, Director of Product Marketing at Micro Focus. “Being able to manage multiple deployment pipelines across this vast, heterogenous system is the biggest problem in scaling Agile and DevOps practices across the enterprise.”

To succeed, enterprises must embrace the fact that hybrid IT environments—on-premises, cloud, mobile, and edge—may always exist, and applications will have different requirements for delivery. Adopting a multi-modal approach is the answer.

Julian Fish, Director of Product Management, Application Release Orchestration at Micro Focus, explains, “As enterprises adopt DevOps to accelerate software delivery, they need to take a disciplined and programmatic approach to ensuring the security, compliance, and performance of the entire value chain.”

Building successful DevOps organizations

So how do DevOps organizations move forward with this reality?

Release management processes can help enterprises start to move applications through their CI/CD pipelines but starts to come up short by the lack of visibility and traceability, poor coordination, and time-consuming manual tasks that are prone to error and difficult to track.  The next step is to move toward release orchestration and automation, which is how successful DevOps organizations support these complex, hybrid IT environments.

With better orchestration comes processes to manage the multiple systems and platforms that host applications. In a recent paper titled “Software Release: A Point of Control for Delivering in a Hybrid IT Landscape,” analysis firm CCS Insight wrote, “There needs to be an interconnected status of process, tools, and deployment platforms if change and release management is to help deliver a coherent DevOps process that spans all systems in use inside and outside an organization.”

Leveraging Micro Focus expertise

Software provider Micro Focus optimizes software delivery with a release orchestration solution comprising of release control and deployment automation. According to the CCS Insights report, Micro Focus Release Control ensures that changes are repeatable, auditable, and have the correct amount of governance. Deployment Automation is key to increasing the speed of software delivery, regardless of destination—cloud, on-premises, or hybrid—by automating processes and mitigating risk.

DevOps can help enterprises derive value from their software through efficient production processes that increase customer satisfaction. By adopting tools and methodologies that directly address today’s ever-increasing demands, IT teams can directly impact ROI and help their enterprises thrive in our digital world.

Learn more

To learn more, join Micro Focus and SD Times for an upcoming discussion that takes a pragmatic view of DevOps in large enterprises.

 

Content provided by SD Times and Micro Focus