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With speed and quality defining the success rate of any digital channel, DevOps has become a cultural norm in the enterprise tech landscape. Studies point out that 61% of organizations that implanted DevOps witnessed higher deliverable quality while 49% reported a sizeable reduction in time-to-market for their digital services.
While the growth trajectory of DevOps is at an all-time high, it is about time that adopters have a clear understanding of how to do it right. This is where DevOps governance comes into the picture.
What Is DevOps Governance?
DevOps as a philosophy or culture brings efficiency and speed to enterprise software development but often without checking for correctness or risk appetite of the approach. DevOps governance encompasses the set of activities or actions that enterprises can adopt to ensure that proper controls are in place to help realize the most risk-free ROI from every DevOps investment.
In simple terms, DevOps governance is all about building awareness of how to do DevOps right through a series of checks, balances, and best practices that ensure a healthy and risk-free population of the enterprise's DevOps pipeline.
DevOps governance brings together different stakeholders in the enterprise application development value-chain and collaboratively works toward setting responsibilities, objectives, and timelines for each activity in the DevOps pipeline.
Why Is DevOps Governance Important?
Now that you have an idea about DevOps governance, it is time to find out why it occupies an important place in the modern enterprise technology landscape. Here are four reasons why:
Promotes Risk Awareness
With any innovative business transformation initiative, risk will be an inherent trait that businesses must manage and mitigate. With technology-driven innovations, there is no difference as risks are bound to be present irrespective of the depth of talent and tools that the enterprise has access to.
However, risk as an entity is easily manageable when all stakeholders are aware of its potential impact, the corrective or preventive course of action to be taken, and the best practices to ensure risk is minimized.
DevOps governance brings in this understanding or awareness about potential risks in a DevOps-led project. It makes developers, test engineers, and other stakeholders understand the intent behind putting controls in place. This enables them to work together and leverage governance controls as a means of managing risk rather than perceiving them as an additional barrier of complexity they must deal with.
Improves Compliance
In any industry, one of the fundamental goals of establishing a governance model is to enhance compliance. DevOps governance, too, plays the same role. By establishing controls over critical processes, enterprises can better understand how their digital workflows will eventually perform under different scenarios. This allows them to automate the same better and eliminate risky compliance deviations.
Rather than focusing on automating just processes, DevOps governance enables enterprises to automate the entire configuration of a process or, in simple terms - automate change management. By eliminating manual intervention across all critical functions, compliance will be better streamlined for services that consume data and information streams generated by such systems.
Secures Development Practices
Governance models in DevOps establish robust control over access privileges for different stakeholders in a software development environment. The most elementary yet one of the most important aspects of secure development is to ensure that any developer or test engineer has "Write" access only to those digital assets they really need.
For example, most developers do not require daily "Write" access to the production stream. Through DevOps governance, access controls can be established wherein "Write" requests for the environment are honored only via limited-time, pre-approved tokens. This is a solid deterrent to security risks.
Eases Code Management
With continuous delivery and deployment of code in modern enterprise digital channels, there are possibilities of erroneous entries in the DevOps pipeline. DevOps governance helps to put an end to this threat by helping development teams follow the "Cleanroom model" on all product pipelines.
Under this model, there will be proper identification, tagging, tracking, and monitoring of all product pipelines. All checks will be in place to ensure that any change request that comes without clearing the cleanroom check will not be allowed to be executed.
DevOps Governance Is Critical. Have You Addressed It Yet?
The large-scale adoption of DevOps has created quite a fanfare amongst the tech fraternity. However, to achieve even better success, enterprises must learn about putting the right controls to eliminate any regretful risks, alongside being aware of the potential advantages of DevOps.
If your business's core focus area is non-tech, then it is very unlikely that there will be a dedicated core team that works on building and implementing a DevOps governance model for your agile product development initiatives. This is where Wissen can help bring better ROI to your DevOps investments. Get in touch with us to learn more about building the most optimal DevOps governance model for your business.
