Fast. Change. New. These describe the business mandate, purpose and imperatives for developers. When stable, reliable and secure describe the business mandate of Operations, it’s no wonder they’re said to be like oil and water, working in silos with hard barriers between their purposes and needs.

As an intelligent and capable software development strategy, DevOps is hard to beat. It pulls on the expertise of the developer to unpack the innovation and create the applications that are needed to drive business at scale, and it tugs on the capabilities and efficiencies of the operations teams to ensure that these innovations and applications are delivered on time, without issues and continuously. In essence, DevOps was designed to minimise the conflicts that traditionally arose between developers and operations when the two teams operated in silos. However, IT Ops still has its issues with Dev, and Dev still thinks that IT Ops can be slow and obstructive. So, what happened?

DevOps isn’t new. In fact, the mash of developers to Ops to create a fresh, new strategicpriority is, in itself, best practice. However, the two disciplines of Developer and IT Ops demand different approaches and methodologies to ensure they work together harmoniously.Their requirements, their workflows, their efficiencies and their toolkits differ, as do their approaches and frameworks. These can clash, and this clash can limit the efficacy of a DevOps team significantly. Which is why it’s important to provide these two disparate teams with the tools and systems they need to operate in a state of, dare it be said, happiness.

From the core of IT Operations (IT OPs) to the essence of development – DevOps has become the de facto term to describe the ongoing competencies of two interconnected and essential ecosystems—development and operations. Highly agile, competent and flexible IT Ops teams are critical to sustainable business growth. It’s IT Ops that supports turning potential into definitive business value, a crucial skill that ensures the business is as capable of leveraging automation as it is in engaging with its vibrant developer community. However, as the world shifts on its axis, IT Ops is becoming even more invaluable as the organisation struggles with balancing innovation with even more restrictions around budget and time.

Automation is one of the hottest trends in IT right now, for good reason. We all know that it can cut out some of the more tedious work involved in data centre management – but far more exciting is the way it can enable software development to proceed at a pace that would have been unthinkable a few years ago. In this blog post, I explore what’s driving automation and how organisations can reap the most benefit.

One of the great paradoxes of technology is that the more successful it is, the more invisible it becomes. Car technology is a case in point. Let me tell you a story to back up my thinking.