How DevOps Reduces the Operational IT Skill Gaps

One of the biggest challenges faced by enterprises today is the Operational IT Skill Gap. This gap is distressing productivity and impacting the quality in this modern application-centric and competitive world. CIOs also confirm that a shortage of tech skills is affecting their ability to respond to digital transformation. How can you close this gap?

Using DevOps

Why?

DevOps is an agile and intelligent approach. It has the potential to increase efficiency and boost productivity. Here are some ways DevOps is helping you reduce the operational IT skill gaps:

A Centralized Monitoring Platform Should be focused

IT operations teams are struggling a lot nowadays. This includes issues like

• Proper monitoring of databases, services, and applications;
• Ability to retain their subject matter experts who can potentially research root cause analysis and recover from application issues;
• Hire and retain all necessary skills to manage applications.

This is where you need smart and big platforms like Big Panda. It gives embedded artificial intelligence, autonomous operations, and centralized monitoring capabilities under one roof. Whether you want to aggregate events and log data from multiple systems at a central point or need to have alerts into a single, manageable incident from multiple incidents, you can do with great ease.

Moving forward, AIOps (Autonomous operations) can then direct incidents based on their type into multiple ticketing systems. This way, you can resolve issues quite fast and with a minimum workforce.

Importance of Automate Testing, Integration, and Deployment

Application management helps you to resolve parts of skills, complexity, and cost. But, to enable less error-prone and more frequent application release cycles, you need continuous integration and deployment platforms (CI/CD) coupled with continuous testing capability.

When CI/CD platforms (such as Jenkins) and automating testing tools (like Selenium) automates testing, deployments, and integration, the knowledge and subject matter expertise packed into release management practices gets auto codifies. Though you will still need a developer to amend necessary change steps like integration, deployment, and regression, tests can be automated. Another great factor, automation & platform deliver documentation using which new IT professionals can easily review DevOps tool configurations and scripts.

Onboard IT Talent by Changing DevOps Culture

The three best DevOps practices include Centralized Monitoring, Automated Testing, Continuous Integration, and Deployment (CI/CD). Operational steps such as automation implementation and tools procurement can help you address the cost, skills, and complexity of application maintenance. The next important consideration is–how these practices adoption can change IT to a culture of DevOps.

IT culture change has many aspects. If you talk specifically about production application maintenance, enterprises take a step ahead towards IT heroics to maintain an application. There is one person who knows all about the critical application in every organization — from issues finding to resolve. In such a scenario, CIO needs to ensure that modern-day cloud infrastructure and applications are easy to manage by different teams with easy to find and with fewer complex processes. Plus, CIO needs to ensure that their team leads to simplified architecture and operational standards and is automating more operational procedures.

A data-driven culture leveraging ML and embedded analytics in an operational platform helps you aid application changes and incidents response efficiently. By overcoming the IT skills gap, architecture standards and centralized monitoring platforms can reduce operational expenses and enhance system reliability. Along with reducing or eliminating the skill gap, it helps you reduce IT costs and increase system reliability.

Final Thoughts

The technology skills gap is the biggest issue that organizations are facing presently and demands prime consideration. However, DevOps methodologies have some promising practices that can close the IT skill gaps and enhance the overall efficiency and productivity of the business. Successive Technologies has Certified Competency and Center of Excellence for Continuous Integration, Deployment, and Continuous Delivery. Our team ensures speedy onboarding of applications by automating the end-to-end delivery pipeline and facilitating continuous integration and development across the leading cloud platforms. Book a free consultation now with our experienced team of professionals who have years of experience in DevOps.