By working with IT across the software development lifecycle via cloud-based DevOps, development teams can decrease software bottlenecks, increase code output and be seen as drivers of the business.
I have a confession. I am Shadow IT. I am the guilty party operations and security love to hate because I expense tens of thousands of dollars in cloud services…every month. Truth be told, my team and I couldn’t afford to wait in line for IT to provision the resources we needed to begin work. We had goals to meet and objectives to achieve – all of which didn’t include waiting in line for IT to give us virtual machines, development platforms or set up sandboxes so we could begin work.
With a lengthy approval process and cost justifications, there was no way I would have been able to secure either the physical infrastructure or cloud vendor approvals I needed to achieve the business unit’s goals. And, honestly, the risk of choosing a vendor that would leak our data, or otherwise put the business at risk, seemed a lot lower than the risk of not getting my job done.
So, even though my monthly cloud bill continued to rise, it didn’t surprise me too much that I was never questioned about the expense because my team was delivering. And, that is exactly what everyone from the business side of things cares about – is development creating new applications and/or services that can be brought to market before the competition? Can we secure ‘first-mover’ status or market leadership because development is firing on all cylinders? These are the questions marketing, business development, and other teams ask. Not, did central IT get you those VMs you needed?