DevOps Spending Tops £1 Million for One-third of UK Organisations, Delphix Study Finds

UK Organizations Embrace DevOps to Deliver Software Faster and More frequently, and to Reduce the Number of Bugs Late in the Development Lifecycle

LONDON and MENLO PARK, Calif. - Oct. 13, 2015 - Delphix, the market leader in Data as a Service, today announced new research into the state of DevOps, revealing that the movement is gaining ground in the UK.

The 2015 State of DevOps Report shows that the majority of UK organisations surveyed (77 per cent) have introduced dedicated budgets and support teams for DevOps, with 35 per cent spending PS1 million or more per year. This comes as the volume of applications that businesses support increases (49 per cent), yet teams need to deliver software faster (66 per cent), release code more frequently (49 per cent) and reduce the number of bugs found late in the development cycle (52 per cent).

"The pace at which companies need to securely deliver and update applications has increased drastically over the last few years," said Iain Chidgey, vice president, International Sales, Delphix. "Traditionally IT could update applications once or twice a year, but today expectations are much higher, with releases being pushed out weekly, daily or even hourly. The 2015 State of DevOps Report points toward continued adoption of DevOps practices within organizations across the UK."

Defining DevOps

On average, organisations have started seven DevOps initiatives in the last 24 months, with this figure set to rise to nine in the next two years as DevOps initiatives become standardised. Although DevOps has established a foothold in the enterprise, the research shows the movement still lacks a strong definition. In total, 59 per cent of respondents believe DevOps is somewhat to strongly defined, but there is disagreement over whether the development side (28 per cent), the operations side (22 per cent) or both combined (50 per cent) share the responsibility for DevOps initiatives, and how those are defined:

* Developers and system administrators collaborating to ease the transition between development and production (64 per cent)
* Evolving operations to meet the demands of agile software development teams (57 per cent)

The study shows that typically, small teams of experts within deployment automation, data management and continuous integration, support DevOps initiatives. More than half (52 per cent) of businesses have three teams with some DevOps responsibility. The remaining 48 per cent have an average of five dedicated DevOps groups. On average, there are 89 full- and part-time staff currently supporting DevOps-related tasks. Whilst development still leads operations for 28 per cent of companies, DevOps is seen as a shared responsibility between development and operations for half.

Measuring success

While the widespread definition of DevOps focuses on agility, the data reveals that organisations are turning to DevOps to identify defects before they get into production. The success of DevOps is measured by the number of defects found in the software development lifecycle (SDLC) with 57 per cent agreeing that teams would spend less time recoding if defects were identified earlier, which currently takes up nearly a quarter of time.

Currently, over half of businesses (56 per cent) identify defects or issues either once the application has been deployed to production or during QA and validation when it takes approximately five days to resolve. Reducing this time has a substantial impact on efficiency and effectiveness as teams spend less time recoding when defects are identified earlier in the development lifecycle.

DevOps delays compromise data security

Currently the most implemented DevOps initiatives include virtual databases (43 per cent), agile data masking (38 per cent) and continuous deployment (36 per cent). As more organisations adopt agile methodologies to rapidly build, test and release new applications, the survey suggests that organizations with a commitment to DevOps require full production data for both QA and development activities. However, 46 per cent of teams admit that they experience delays waiting for testing and development data environments, with just 8 per cent able to reset the test environment within 10 minutes.

Because one of the biggest challenges that faces DevOps initiatives is limited testing due to data issues, DevOps practitioners are working around data security constraints and taking shortcuts with production data in non-production testing environments. Overall, four in 10 of those surveyed admit that developers and QA personnel are granted unaudited access to production data.

The survey of 100 UK IT professionals with an active involvement in DevOps, software development, database administration, quality assurance or product support, was conducted by Vanson Bourne as part of the annual 2015 State of DevOps Report sponsored by Delphix. Delphix previously announced global results for the 2015 State of DevOps Report on Aug. 20, 2015.

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About the 2015 Annual State of DevOps
The 2015 Annual State of DevOps report is designed to help understand and define the role of DevOps, its evolving best practices, and current and planned DevOps investments. More than 2,000 respondents who are active in DevOps, software development, quality assurance or product support participated in the survey, working at organisations of at least 100 employees located in North America, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the Netherlands. Participants included DevOps leaders who are directly involved in what they consider to be a strongly defined and successful series of DevOps initiatives, and DevOps practitioners who are directly involved in an ongoing DevOps initiative and are searching for a strongly defined vision of DevOps success. Respondent titles include CIO, IT director, IT manager, software engineer, system administrator and database administrator.

About Delphix
Delphix is the market leader in Data as a Service, which helps enterprises accelerate application projects by 50 percent, including cloud migrations, custom development, and ERP rollouts. Delphix provides its DaaS Platform as on-premises or cloud software that automatically delivers the right data to the right team at the right time, instead of relying on complex processes and multiple IT teams to manually move unsecured data across systems. More than 25 percent of the Global 100 use Delphix to deliver data 99 percent faster across development, testing, and reporting environments, driving dramatic increases in productivity while improving data security. Delphix is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, with offices around the world.

Delphix is a trademark of Delphix Corp. in the United States and other jurisdictions. All other marks and names may be trademarks of their respective organizations. The use of the word "partner" or "partnership" does not imply a legal partnership relationship between Delphix and any other organisation.

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Serge Reuter / Ellie Rider
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