Top 10 Benefits of DevOps for Small Businesses in 2023

DevOps has quickly captured the IT industry’s attention and for all the right reasons, with the ever-changing and fast-paced work environment, faster delivery of projects, and shortened turnaround time in the software development market have become crucial success factors for business growth.

But what is DevOps?

DevOps is the combination of practices, and tools that help increase a business’s ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity: improving products at a faster pace than business using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.

This speed allows businesses to better serve their customers and compete more effectively in the market. On that note if you are wondering what are the benefits of DevOps for small businesses and how does it work in practice?
Stick to the end to find out all these answers in this comprehensive guide.

What is DevOps?

In simple terms, DevOps is a set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) to shorten the system development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high-quality software solutions.

The main objective of DevOps is to establish a culture where developing, testing, and launching software can happen quickly, frequently, and reliably.

DevOps is complementary to Agile software development, multiple DevOps aspects came from Agile methodology. Many enterprises use DevOps while implementing Agile methodology. Implementing DevOps becomes important even for small businesses because of the presence of completing and conflicting priorities that may result in compromising product quality.

DevOps improves the speed of the overall process of software development by collaborating teams and removing the criteria of manual communication and delays in processing with efficient automation. On that note with the basics of DevOps, let’s explore how it works in practice before we dive into the benefits of DevOps.

How does DevOps work?

When a business wants to build a product for customers, before it is delivered to customers, this product has to pass through the main five core stages, planning, building, testing, releasing, and monitoring.

With the DevOps model, both the development team and operations teams work collaboratively throughout the product’s life cycle, instead of functioning as separate entities. Traditionally, these two separate teams operated in their world. To keep each other up to speed, they had to invest a lot of time and effort in meetings, conferences, and email exchanges.

However, by adopting DevOps, businesses can shift their focus from departmental goals to the overall business goal and introduce a collaborative and proactive work environment. With the help of various automated tools and accelerated processes, teams of such businesses work together more closely and identify and resolve issues efficiently. In short, DevOps priortizes security and automates and monitors the entire software delivery process, from development to production.

Why is DevOps important for Small Businesses?

Many people confuse DevOps as a new technology that helps in faster software development and deployment processes, however, DevOps is more than just a technology. DevOps can be considered a new thinking approach that is focused on the automation of different processes along with the development and deployment of software or IT operations.

One of the main benefits of DevOps is its ability to foster changes in thinking about the collaboration between software development and the IT operations team. So, it would not be wrong to say that DevOps is a paradigm-shifting methodology focused on the combination of teams, processes, and technologies.

Several advantages of DevOps primarily originate from the collaboration among teams and the principles of continuous integration and delivery.

In short, there are many reasons why DevOps is important for small businesses. Some of the key reasons include:

» DevOps improves Collaboration and communication: DevOps facilitates collaboration and communication between development and operations teams, which can lead to quicker problem-solving and more efficient workflows.

» Faster Development & Deployment of Software: By automating multiple processes and streamlining workflows, DevOps can help businesses deliver software and updates faster, improving agility and competitiveness.

» DevOps Increases Reliability: By adopting numerous practices such as continuous integration and delivery, businesses with the help of DevOps can improve the reliability and stability of their systems and reduce the risk of errors or downtime.

» Better Customer Satisfaction: By launching software and updates more quickly and reliably, small businesses can improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

» Cost Savings: By automating many processes and reducing the overall time and resources required to deliver software, DevOps can help businesses reduce costs and improve their bottom line.

Overall, implementing DevOps can help businesses improve the speed, reliability, and efficiency of their software development and delivery processes, leading to a wide range of business benefits.

What are the Business Advantages of DevOps?

According to the reports, In 2018, DevOps transformation gained prominent recognition, with over 50% of businesses involved with DevOps. Therefore, as a small business, you have enough reasons to start looking into DevOps implementation.

On that note, here are the top 10 benefits of DevOps for small businesses:

1. Innovation Through Collaboration

When it comes to the benefits of DevOps the biggest one is that Implementing DevOps makes the job of managers and team leads easier.

As a project manager, you no longer have to struggle to get your software development teams and operations teams on the same page, they will automatically work in harmony under the DevOps umbrella.

Even if teams disagree on some approach for a specific project, the manager can resolve the conflict easily because everybody is reading off the same centralized playbook.

Further, with such an effective collaboration, the teams will be able to find new ideas and problem-solving techniques that will lead to a better outcome.

Most importantly, modern automation tools can also help team leaders optimize their task scheduling, reporting, and feedback processing which will reduce the disturbing elements and help teams to deliver the final product faster.

2. Faster Product Launches

In the current digital landscape, speed is an essential driving force for businesses seeking to stay competitive. As we have discussed earlier, DevOps can help your business increase the speed of the deployment and launching of software by removing obstacles such as interdepartmental conflicts.

As per the report of the 2021 Accelerate State of DevOps Report, elite and high-performance teams deploy 973 times more rapidly and have 6570 times faster lead times compared to low performers. As a result, your business can gain a competitive advantage by releasing updates and fixing bugs faster.

3. Hand-in-Hand Security and Development

Moving forward in the list of the 10 benefits of DevOps, in the rapidly increasing cybercrime space, A well-crafted and adequately implemented DevOps strategy can improve the security of your business infrastructure and your product’s security.

DevSecOps is a separate segment of DevOps that fully works on the security aspect. It is made of combining three words Development, Security, and Operations, that integrate security throughout the IT lifecycle.

DevsecOps increases the recovery speed through incremental improvements, automated compliance policies, and granular controls. Additionally, this approach reduces cost and shortens timelines by identifying and outlining potential flaws during the early stages of the development effort.

For this reason, as a business, you must adopt the DevOps approach throughout the delivery pipeline to protect your organization’s intellectual property.

4. Better Balance of Stability and New Features

With DevOps, businesses don’t have to worry about balancing stability and introducing new features. The non-DevOps approach generally faces various challenges regarding the release of new features and the stability of the application. In this case, the value of the development team depends on the new updates. On the other hand, the value of the IT operations team depends on the health of the overall system.

However, DevOps advantages reflect with the need for the whole team to take responsibility for the delivery of new features with stability. Further, DevOps uses a combination of test-driven techniques, a shared codebase, automated deployments, and continuous integration for the proactive identification of issues in the application code, configuration, or infrastructure.

So, the operations team wouldn’t have to worry about the code issues during the final stages. The benefits of DevOps in maintaining a better balance of stability with the introduction of new features are also evident with reduced problem complexity.

5. Reduces Risks and Wastage

Today, with the digital transformation, businesses can face several threats as well. Updating and adjusting the existing systems can lead to a lack of protection and more errors. However, DevOps removed such risks by incorporating protection into the life cycle of software development. Also, it helps in saving time by tackling potential security issues.

Further, DevOps allows businesses to run lean and perform rapidly, leading to the use of capital more effectively while eliminating waste. DevOps is more about creating value and coping with waste than cutting costs. DevOps’ implementation allows small businesses to reduce operations and moves several responsibilities to the development team.

6. Preventing Data Silos

Traditional development approaches confine every department to its echo chamber. The developer team writes their code and builds components without any collaboration from the operational and security team, leading to data silos within the pipeline.

However, with DevOps, these otherwise-isolated silos are instead integrated toward a main goal that every team must focus on. Data silos might not be a problem initially for businesses, but they could surface as the business scales. DevOps handles the data silos from the initial stage.

As mentioned earlier, it fosters collaboration between IT and non-technical teams across the business, thus it makes it easy to prevent data silos and break them in case of form in the future.

7. Reduced Workload with Automation

Another of the most significant aspects that drive multiple benefits of DevOps refers to the continuous release and deployment of software. DevOps offers automation of many processes for integrating new features in applications and ensuring their deployment.

The automation of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines in DevOps assist in faster development and integration of code. The software development processes get a major advantage with DevOps through the reduction of time to market and shorter execution time.

As a result, DevOps simplifies CI and CD for businesses through automation. In addition, the automation of quality assurance and embedding it in the processes ensures the code quality of the project.

8. Highly Motivated Teams

Adopting a DevOps approach helps businesses establish a friendly working environment that improves transparency, close collaboration, and respect. As a result, in such workplaces, the team morale always stays higher. Any unplanned work such as optimization processes and unprecedented changes in the project that were not part of the original project plan can affect the morale of teams working on a specific project. For instance, the time of developer spends fixing a big falls under the unplanned work category.

However, removing unplanned work is a key principle of DevOps, businesses can boost team morale by establishing a system for proactively dealing with unplanned work. This will also help your technical team buy into the DevOps methodology because they will end up working smarter and faster.

9. Substantial Cost-Savings

One of the main benefits of DevOps is that it helps businesses reduce their overall costs. Adopting DevOps might sound expensive to you, owing to the multiple numbers of automated processes that go into it.

But in reality, the DevOps model helps businesses reduce costs in several ways, including:

» Software release costs: By automating your release and delivery pipeline, DevOps helps you save money by removing redundancies that add to the overall cost of the software.

» Network downtime costs: DevOps offers stability and availability that will help you save money that you would have lost when fixing downtimes. Multiple features such as automated testing, performance monitoring, and CI/CD practices will help you identify the root cause of issues.

» Operational costs: Operational cost covers all the expenses spent on buying tools, hiring new experts, and deploying stable application versions. Your DevOps approach will help you mitigate these expenses through the use of automation tools and cloud technology.

10. Better Customer Experience

The DevOps model relies not only on feedback from the internal team but also from customers, consumers, and stakeholders. This open feedback approach makes it possible for businesses to get a bead on consumer and customer sentiments when developing a product.

For example, let’s say your team is building a payment app and it is about to enter the development pipeline, in this case implementing a DevOps strategy will help you stay in touch with the app’s target audience throughout its lifecycle. By doing so, you will be able to address concerns through updates and new app features.

As a result, the final version of your app will appeal to your target audience by meeting the time to market as well as addressing the main pain points.

These are the 10 key DevOps advantages that you will gain by implementing DevOps in your business.

What makes DevOps a Success?

After we have discussed the multiple benefits of DevOps, it is time to look at how you can ensure the successful implementation of DevOps.

DevOps, as a service, prioritizes customer satisfaction by providing quick delivery of features and updates, this makes DevOps a more preferred method than the traditional model.

The key factors that ensure the successful implementation of DevOps in a business are:

1. Continuous Integrated Operation

Continuous integration is the leading factor that involves gathering the changes of code and collectively making them go through systematic and automated test phases.

This step, unlike the traditional method, helps in identifying flaws, correcting them early, and ensuring the quality before releasing the product or feature.

2. Continous Delivery

All the new changes in the code of software are delivered to the production phase where general testing takes place. Later, the deployed output is further made to go through a standard testing process.

3. Continuous Collaboration

This step involves breaking down single and separated services and connecting them to work in unity as multiple yet independent services.

4. Less manual management of infrastructure

As a business, you don’t need to the flawed traditional infrastructure management method. The new process ensures proper management with multiple DevOps automation tools and the use of infrastructure through code.

5. Code for policy management

As codification replaces the manual management of important configurations and infrastructure, detecting flaws and reconfiguration has become faster and easier with automated tools.

Hence, it saves time and increases the efficiency of the overall operations of a project.

Future of DevOps

Technology is transforming every aspect of the industry, and automation has flourished in the past few years. DevOps has established itself as a potential software development methodology for successful digital transformation.

According to a recent market survey, the DevOps market will exceed $20 billion by 2026, increasing at a CAGR of 24.7% from 2019 to 2026.

DevOps has evolved rapid and dependable software development, delivery, improved quality, and higher customer satisfaction. With DevOps service, businesses can actively build and scale projects, leveraging infrastructure as code and automation to streamline processes and reduce manual effort. This helps to improve the overall efficiency of the business, reduce errors, and accelerate software delivery.

Additionally, DevOps promotes infrastructure structuring and facilitates the automation of numerous processes, enabling teams to focus on delivering value to customers. At last, it would not be wrong to say that DevOps continues to evolve and pivot to drive significant IT transformations that directly bolster business goals and objectives. It will continue to help in enhancing the company’s ability to design, produce, launch, and maintain high-quality software solutions.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. What Does DevOps Do?

Ans. DevOps is a set of practices that combines the software development team and operations team to improve the speed, quality, and reliability of software delivery. DevOps is all about collaboration and communication between development and operations teams.

Q2. What are the benefits of DevOps?

Ans. There are many DevOps advantages, by implementing DevOps, businesses can improve the speed, reliability, and efficiency of their software development and delivery processes, leading to a wide range of business benefits.

Q3. What Does DevOps Stand For?

Ans. DevOps stands for Dev (Development) and Ops (Operations)  being combined into a single practice. In simple terms, DevOps is about removing the barriers between development, and operations teams.

Under a DevOps model, development and operations teams work collaboratively across the entire software application life cycle, from development and test through deployment to operations.

Q4. Does DevOps have a Future?

Ans. We believe that DevOps has a bright future. With DevOps as a service, businesses can actively build and scale projects, leveraging infrastructure as code and automation to streamline processes and reduce manual effort.

It will continue to help in enhancing the company’s ability to design, produce, launch, and maintain high-quality software solutions.