New Research Reveals Data Issues Represent the Biggest Challenge to DevOps Initiatives

Delphix Partners with Gleanster Research on 2015 Annual State of DevOps Report

Survey Illustrates that DevOps Continues to Gain Momentum But Lacks Consistent Definition and Metrics Among its IT Leaders and Practitioners; Data Security Emerges as a Significant Risk in DevOps Initiatives

MENLO PARK, Calif., Aug. 20, 2015 - Delphix, the market leader in Data as a Service, today announced the 2015 State of DevOps report, a new annual report designed to help understand and define the role of DevOps, its evolving best practices, and current and planned DevOps investments.

In partnership with Delphix, Gleanster Research surveyed more than 2,000 DevOps leaders and practitioners across North America and Europe to assess current industry perceptions of DevOps and what is expected for its future. The report indicates that DevOps continues to gain momentum, but data issues - including data security - are major challenges, while the definition of DevOps lacks consistency and success metrics among its leaders and practitioners within IT organizations.

The report finds DevOps continues to gain traction in the industry, with 87 percent of DevOps leaders and 73 percent of practitioners reporting that they have groups dedicated to DevOps initiatives, and nearly half of all respondents (44 percent) reporting DevOps budgets of $1 million or more. However, the research also highlights that while a majority of all respondents believe DevOps is strongly or somewhat defined (75 percent), these definitions vary widely, with DevOps being described as:

• Developers and system administrators collaborating to ease the transition between development and production (84 percent)

• Using infrastructure automation to facilitate self-service provisioning of infrastructure by development teams (69 percent)

• Evolving operations to meet the demands of agile software development teams (60 percent)

• Developers taking full responsibility for all operations tasks (42 percent)

• Increasing frequency of deployments to uncover defects earlier in the development lifecycle (35 percent)

Meanwhile, the research indicates that data plays a major role in DevOps and is an area of risk to be closely examined:

• Forty-six percent of DevOps leaders report data issues as the biggest challenge to enabling their organizations to use DevOps in testing environments

• A majority of all respondents indicate that developers and quality assurance personnel have access to production data, yet this access is not audited (leaders 72 percent, practitioners 59 percent)

• More than two-thirds of all respondents (71 percent) report that masked data is refreshed from production only once a week or less

Other key findings in the report include:

• The top three reasons for starting DevOps initiatives among all respondents are to deliver software faster (66 percent), identify bugs earlier (44 percent), and deliver software more frequently (43 percent)

• Eighty percent of all respondents indicated they were under strong pressure to deliver higher-quality quality software in a variety of ways:

  • Delivering software to production with fewer defects (leaders 70 percent, practitioners 59 percent)

  • Identifying defects earlier in the software development lifecycle (leaders 68 percent, practitioners 62 percent)

  • Delivering software faster (leaders 65 percent, practitioners 57 percent)

  • Delivering software with fewer resources (leaders 32 percent, practitioners 55 percent)

• Forty-eight percent of DevOps leaders reported that DevOps initiatives resulted in more defects being identified earlier in the software development cycle, suggesting that when defects are identified earlier in the development lifecycle, teams spend less time recoding and more time delivering value

• DevOps leaders more frequently report that development teams drive DevOps within organizations, while practitioners more frequently state that DevOps is driven by operations teams, with approximately one-third of each group stating it is a shared model:

  • Operations (leaders 17 percent, practitioners 25 percent)

  • Development (leaders 50 percent, practitioners 39 percent)

  • Shared (leaders 34 percent, practitioners 35 percent)

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 organizations 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 organization.

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Media Contacts

Nick Fuentes
Delphix Corporate Communications
+1 (650) 681-3981
nick.fuentes@delphix.com