How DevOps can help businesses during COVID-19

PCQuest, in association with Datamato and IBM, held a live webinar on the theme of “DevOps As a Key Differentiator” to give businesses a guided tour on how DevOps and Cloud Adoption can become a key differentiator for BFSI and Retail sectors during Covid-19 crisis.

Sunil Rajguru, Editor, PCQuest, said that this current crisis presents an opportunity for businesses to embrace digital technologies to ride through the crisis and prosper.

The live webinar was well-attended and participants got detailed information on the solutions from IBM and Datamato can help make their DevOps and App modernization journey a smooth one.

With the Covid-19 outbreak kicking in an unprecedented social distancing and remote work culture, created a set of challenges for business such as business disruption, cashflow issues resulting in workforce reduction and delays in IT deliveries. To cope up with these sudden changes in the market made them find new ways of doing business, and turn themselves around.

“DevOps can make a difference in this scenario, because it reduces the dependence on humans, and the need to socially collaborate, and instead focuses on speed, agility, quality and automation to respond faster to the changing market demands. In fact, the businesses which had a DevOps practices and culture already in place are in an advantageous position today,” said Vrushank Salaskar, Vice President/ Strategic Engagement, Datamato.

DevOps increases businesses' ability to deliver applications and services at a faster pace than organizations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes.  Datamato helps enterprises implement DevOps practices that fit their unique environment.

He explained how DevOps automation and a fully automated CI/CD pipeline can encapsulate everything right from Build and Packaging to Deployment and Release, Testing and even Infrastructure Provisioning and deployment of applications.

IBM UrbanCodeDeploy is one useful tool that helps you to address two use cases in DevOps setting- Deployment Automation and Environment Provisioning. Datamato has developed an Environment Provisioning solution for BFSI using IBM BluePrint Designer to replicate an application from one environment to another. This reduces migration time by 70-90 percent.

When it comes to application modernization there is a growing tendency among business to switch from monolithic to microservices architecture. “But enterprises often face challenges to embark on this app modernization or cloud-native journey as they don’t have the skills or know-hows of migrating from a monolithic to a microservices architecture,” said Samit Shetty, Business Leader-ISA, IBM India.

IBM Cloud Paks for applications not only helps businesses to develop new, cloud-native applications, but it also gives them an open, faster and secure way to move their core business applications to any cloud.

The webinar also highlighted the fact that it is important for businesses to have a DevOps culture in place, not just the tools and technology only. People are also needed to be trained to adapt to the DevOps practices to make it a success.