Driving digital innovation with DevSecOps

While we expect economic growth to slow this year, a recent survey from Capterra found that most Australian businesses anticipate spending 10 to 20% more on technology and software than last year. Several factors drive the need for digital transformation — growing threats to cybersecurity, widespread AI adoption and the need for technology leaders to rationalise investments amidst the current economic climate.

On the back of ongoing high-profile breaches, the Australian Government has begun coordinating a cyber overhaul, which includes a new cybersecurity strategy. Organisations must balance evolving compliance demands while proactively engaging with AI-powered technologies to stay competitive. Leaders will require a commitment to metrics that give insight into how digital transformation and technological investments deliver value and drive business results.

Driving innovation by reducing toolchain complexity

Beyond focusing on development efficiencies, organisations now need to expand the scope of value stream mapping to provide a more holistic view of the advantages organisations deliver to their users and customers, both internal and external. A broader scope can lead to better alignment between teams and functions, a more effective understanding of the broader impact of products and services, and improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

According to Jim Mercer, Research Vice President DevOps and DevSecOps at IDC, "Modern DevOps platforms can help organisations drive business agility and accelerate enterprise digital transformation by reducing complexity in managing toolchains while incorporating DevSecOps.”

He goes on to highlight the importance of clarifying how organisations measure success, noting, “IT leaders should start by defining the right technical and business metrics to enable top-level business outcomes before ensuring they have the right people and processes.”

Recent research from GitLab shows 72% of respondents either use a DevSecOps platform or plan to move to one within a year, citing a more efficient DevSecOps practice, improved collaboration and better security resulting in better code quality as the key drivers towards transformational change.

Quantifying value with value stream management

As innovation and delivery meets zero tolerance for outages or security breaches, value stream management has become an emerging practice. Value stream management requires organisations to update their development mindset to put the customer at the centre. The approach outlines the software development process from ideation to customer value realisation, rather than focusing on features and functionality. Instead, organisations ensure the efforts and resources invested in delivering value to customers will improve flows and remove bottlenecks, optimising the software development cycle and shortening time to market.

By optimising the value stream, organisations can reduce waste, increase efficiency and ultimately deliver more value to their customers. Value stream management enables organisations to identify and address areas that require improvement, which can result in faster delivery times, better quality products or services, and more satisfied customers.

Embracing DevSecOps methodologies

DevSecOps is playing an increasingly important role in optimising value flow. By using a platform that incorporates value stream management capabilities, teams are able to gain insights across planning, monitoring and releases during the development process. By analysing the data flows from all DevOps stages, a DevSecOps platform can surface insights into how software delivery teams spend their time without the need for external tools.

Some common pain points in the development lifecycle for organisations include complex toolchains and processes, inefficient development environments and no single source of truth or single code repository. These obstacles can impede an organisation’s ability to extract the most value from their DevOps environment and achieve faster, higher quality and more secure development and release cycles.

The DevSecOps methodology enables teams to deliver value quickly while ensuring the highest levels of security. By integrating security into the software development pipeline from design to deployment, teams can promptly identify and address potential cyber risks.

Instilling a DevSecOps culture and approach maximises the overall efficiency and quality of the software development process. To get there, organisations need to prioritise collaboration between security teams and developers to avoid silos and deliver software efficiently.

To remain competitive in the current climate, value stream management can enable organisations to improve collaboration and unlock true agility in the software development and deployment process. By enabling a successful mindset shift and transition to DevSecOps platforms, organisations can bring greater security, speed and agility into their innovation efforts.

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