News Feature | June 3, 2015

Are DevOps The Best Route For Government Agencies To The Cloud?

Christine Kern

By Christine Kern, contributing writer

Are DevOps The Best Route For Government Agencies To The Cloud?

Approximately two-thirds of Feds think DevOps will help agencies transition to the cloud faster and improve IT collaboration and migration speed — but they can’t do it alone. These are the findings of a new study by MeriTalk and underwritten by Accenture Federal Services, titled “The Agile Advantage: Can DevOps Move Cloud to the Fast Lane?”

Federal agencies are not making the shift to the cloud as quickly as anticipated. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported agencies have increased cloud investment levels by just 1 percent over the past two years.

The MeriTalk/Accenture report demonstrates that DevOps could be the solution. In the survey of 152 federal agency IT managers, 57 percent believe it can help agencies succeed in the cloud, and 63 percent believe that it will speed application deliver and migration. In addition, 68 percent of respondents believe that DevOps is a viable path to improving collaboration between IT development, security, and operations teams, and 62 percent believe that it would accelerate application testing.

However, practice is lagging because of structural and cultural barriers. Among top obstacles to migration are infrastructure complexity (cited by 42 percent of respondents); fear of change (40 percent); inflexible practices (40 percent); and an absence of clear strategy (35 percent).

One of the challenges is that Federal agencies are not properly equipped for the transition, with only 12 percent of Feds reporting that their IT department has all of the requisite tools to complete the migration to the cloud. And 78 percent of IT managers believe that their IT department needs to improve collaboration to enable a more cohesive move to the cloud.

“We’ve heard a lot about cloud barriers, and we’ve all seen the lackluster GAO cloud spending data,” Steve O’Keefe, founder MeriTalk stated. “This study highlights a viable path forward. DevOps can help agencies change lanes and shift from inefficient silos to a dynamic, collaborative environment. It’s about people and how they work together, as well as the technology they use.”