The pressure to release updates into production systems and applications faster than ever is taking its toll, a new poll conducted for software intelligence company Dynatrace revealed today, with the global survey of 800 Chief Information Officers (CIOs) putting a spotlight on the need to innovate ever-faster.
The report revealed that enterprises are pushing out an average of three new software updates every working hour as they turn to cloud native DevOps to drive faster innovation — but face a simultaneous increase in the speed, risk and complexity of successful app delivery as a result, often resulting in poor UX.
“Every organization on the planet is a software company these days. Market leaders like Amazon are releasing multiple software updates every second. The modern approach to delivering software is about agile, fast development cycles and releasing into dynamic, hybrid multi-cloud environments,” said Andreas Grabner, DevOps Activist at Dynatrace.
He added: “Yet end users also expect the steady flow of new features and updates to work perfectly, without compromise. The challenge for IT is to deliver fast, while moving to a cloud native architecture and maintaining user experience.”
Pressure Continuing to Mount
The research, “Speed of Innovation in the Cloud: The Top 5 Challenges“, conducted by Vanson Bourne, showed that the issue is unlikely to slow anytime soon.
Looking ahead, a massive 89 percent of CIOs said they will need to release updates into production systems and applications even faster in the future.
However, the speed of releases can come at a cost. A huge 64 percent admitted they are forced to compromise between faster innovation and the need to ensure customers have a great software experience.
Top Five Challenges
The report identified five top challenges to effective innovation in the enterprise cloud.
These include unplanned work that regularly derails digital transformation projects, including IT outages caused by “external issues”, performance issues caused by database changes and performance issues introduced by compliance issues.
The company also identifies challenges in re-engineering applications into dynamic microservices and containers; a step that is increasingly necessary to achieve improvements in agility and speed, but one which requires a new approach to how software is delivered to the end-user.
Dynatrace suggests establishing a “BizDevOps” approach that brings together teams from across IT and business departments, giving them collaborative tools and software intelligence.
“This information must be democratized to fuel closer collaboration and enable a culture where the teams that build digital services have equal responsibility for running them; allowing them to take pride in the impact their efforts have on the business and its customers.”
