How Managed DevOps Services Can Help You Accelerate Business Transformation

DevOps, short for development and operations, is a collaborative methodology meant to break down the barrier between development and operations teams in an organization. Traditionally siloed, these two teams merge into one, with everyone using common DevOps practices, behaviors and tools to manage the entire application lifecycle—from planning and development to testing and deployment to management and operations.  

Why is this so important? Because, when organizations adopt DevOps tools and best practices, they can: 

• Gain a more collaborative approach to software development that facilitates innovation and business transformation. 
• Increase the speed at which they can deliver new products as well as changes, updates and enhancements to applications and services.  
• Build, test and deploy incremental updates on a continuous basis, without affecting the reliability of the underlying infrastructure. 
• Automate processes for maximum efficiency and agility. 

In short, with DevOps, organizations can go-to-market quicker, improve products faster, accelerate their pace of innovation, and achieve competitive differentiation and business transformation—all benefits that are now a “must have” to thrive in today’s extremely crowded business landscape. In fact, 86% of organizations acknowledge that it’s important for their company to develop and begin production of new software quickly.  

It’s no surprise, then, to learn that 77% of organizations say they currently rely on DevOps to deploy software, or plan to in the near future.  

Despite its clear benefits, however, true DevOps success can be difficult. In fact, only 10% of organizations say their company is successful at rapid software development and deployment. The reason? Many enterprises point to organizational silos as a challenge to delivering value to the market faster, while others cite legacy technology, internal staffing shortages, and resistance to change as major roadblocks. 

In this blog post, we break down the benefits of Managed DevOps Services and how it can help companies realize the true value of DevOps—so they can start innovating faster. We’ll also share three real-world success stories that showcase the impact Managed DevOps Services can have on your business.  

Overcoming DevOps Challenges with Managed Services 

To overcome today’s DevOps challenges and realize its benefits, many organizations are turning to third-party expertise for support—either to help augment internal teams or outsource those skills entirely.  

Known as Cloud DevOps at Navisite, this recurring service gives organizations immediate access to DevOps experts with varying specialized skills and a true third-party digital transformation partner that supports application modernization and cloud adoption activities. Managed DevOps Services often include: 

• A dedicated team of cloud-savvy engineers. 
• Continuous modernization of applications and cloud infrastructure, including moving legacy workloads to new flexible and scalable architecture and shifting workloads from on-premises to the cloud. 
• Adoption of new tools, cloud services and processes.  
• Implementation of powerful monitoring and analysis tools to help customers better understand pain points and how to overcome them.  
• The automation of repetitive cloud infrastructure tasks. 
• Cloud optimization to find ongoing opportunities to increase workload performance and reduce cloud costs.  

What are the benefits of Managed DevOps Services? Managed DevOps services have helped countless organizations overcome the common barriers to DevOps adoption and success and offer proven benefits, including:  

• Modernized legacy workloads for continuous improvements and reduced total cost of ownership. 
• Accelerated deployment of changes, releases and new applications. 
• The ability to innovate more rapidly, resulting in true business transformation. 
• Improved technical operations with the continuous modernization of cloud infrastructure. 
• Improved workload performance and infrastructure reliability.  

Perhaps most importantly, Managed DevOps Services enable organizations to offload the DevOps work to third-party experts, so internal teams can stay focused on business objectives, growth and competitive differentiation.  

Real-World Managed DevOps Success Stories 

To get an inside look at how managed DevOps can benefit companies, here are three real-world case studies detailing how these Navisite customers took advantage of our Cloud DevOps Service to transform their business: 

Advanced Cyber Security 

Advanced Cyber Security (ACS) tapped Navisite to migrate its flagship product EndpointLock™ to Amazon Web Services (AWS). As part of the migration, ACS leveraged Navisite’s DevOps expertise to create an environment that would allow their developers to continually innovate using modern DevOps best practices.  

Navisite’s cloud experts built three environments on AWS—development, staging and production—and moved the company’s code base to .NET on Windows-based Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instances. From there, Navisite developed a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline to create a modern code pipeline that enabled the team at ACS to rapidly develop and deploy changes, upgrades and new features. 

According to Stephen Santise, director of technology at ACS: “Navisite modernized and automated our DevOps process, so deploying code on AWS is fast and easy. Our team can confidently and securely build, test and push changes into production without having to worry about infrastructure management.” 

MediaZilla 

MediaZilla’s online media platform was growing rapidly, and managing the IT infrastructure was increasingly becoming a distraction for its software development team. The company needed to focus on pushing out new features, while at the same time, giving its users the security and resilience they required. 

MediaZilla engaged Navisite to build a CI/CD pipeline that automated the entire code deployment process. Now, MediaZilla is able to push small, incremental updates to its software, increasing the pace of innovation, and customers benefit from enhanced automation, security and resilience.  

Michael Guastamacchio, CEO and co-founder of MediaZilla, said: “At MediaZilla, our pace of innovation is always accelerating. Navisite helped us to shift into another gear by architecting a CI/CD pipeline that has eliminated friction from our code deployment process. Navisite’s DevOps expertise has been invaluable to us.” 

Clinigen Limited 

Clinigen Limited (Clinigen) was looking to simplify and modernize the process it used to update and refresh its development, testing and production environments supporting both Oracle E-Business Suite (EBS) and Clinigen Direct, its dedicated service for healthcare professionals struggling with shortages of medication or who need access to unlicensed or unavailable medicines. Because the two systems work in concert, the challenge became keeping up with the rapid rate of change while ensuring the systems, along with lower-level development and testing environments, all remain in sync and compatible. 

Clinigen turned to Navisite to automate the entire refresh cycle, which would not only accelerate the implementation of changes, but also eliminate the potential for human error associated with the highly manual, days-long process. Navisite used modern DevOps best practices to automate each step in the environment cloning, refresh and synchronization process. With the environment cloning process now fully automated, the refresh cycle has been reduced from three-plus days to an 18-hour range.  

Andy Parker, vice president of information technology at Clinigen, noted: “With the automation Navisite has introduced, we’ve been able to deliver new enhancements into production much faster. This has allowed us to accelerate modernization of our Oracle EBS-driven operations as well as service levels on the front-end for healthcare professionals using Clinigen Direct.” 

When to Consider Managed DevOps Services 

The benefits of Managed DevOps Services are proven—but how do you know if turning to third-party experts is right for your business?   

Here are a few reasons businesses might consider Managed DevOps Services: 

• Inefficient change deployment: Whether it’s user resistance to the new DevOps way, manual processes that result in significant lag time between a change request and implementation, the use of legacy tools, or technical issues along the way, many organizations struggle to efficiently deploy changes to their applications and infrastructures.  

• Difficulty adopting cloud technologies and microservice architectures: DevOps is all about speed, agility and flexibility, and leveraging cloud computing and microservices architectures play a huge role in delivering these benefits to DevOps teams. But many organizations lack the skillsets and resources needed to successful implement these innovative technologies.  

• Inability to scale cloud infrastructure: Similarly, the inability to scale cloud infrastructure also can have a significant impact on DevOps success. There are a number of reasons organizations might have a hard time scaling, including performance and reliability issues, a sprawling application footprint, complex systems and processes, and a lack of infrastructure visibility.  

• Launching new product or service: Many businesses are looking to deploy modern infrastructure and practices on the cloud—and they need the capabilities, tools and technology to deploy and automate these changes quickly.  

• Skills shortage of DevOps resources: The cloud has not only transformed DevOps, but also the skills required of a DevOps professional. Today, organizations seek DevOps employees who possess a diverse technical skillset—including expertise in development, containers, serverless computing, automation, testing, etc.—along with soft skills, such as flexibility, adaptability and a growth-focused mindset. This unique combination is hard to find, resulting in a limited candidate pool. 

Why Navisite for Managed DevOps Services 

Navisite’s managed DevOps service, known as our Cloud DevOps Service, lets you unload your DevOps challenges to our cloud experts, so you can focus on innovation rather than application development. Our dedicated team of engineers provides the expertise, best practices and tools you need to modernize your legacy workloads, quickly deploy changes and improve technical operations. By partnering with us, you can expedite the delivery of new features and functionality, go to market faster and benefit from cloud-native architectures that provide scalability, availability, reliability and security. To find out how Navisite can support your company’s DevOps goals, contact us today.