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The DevOps movement is gaining ground in the UK with spending topping £1 million for one in three UK organisations, according to latest research published by Delphix.

More than three quarters (77%) of organisations surveyed said they had introduced dedicated budgets and support teams for DevOps. Companies have on average introduced seven DevOps initiatives over the past 24 months, with this figure expected to rise to nine in the next two years.

The influences for DevOps are evident. Two thirds (66%) of teams say they need to deliver software faster, while almost half (49%) say the volume of applications that businesses support is increasing and code is being released more frequently.

Almost three in five (59%) of those polled say DevOps is somewhat to strongly defined – yet the responsibility of who controls DevOps initiatives is still up in the air, with 28% opting for the development side, 22% the operations side and the remaining 50% saying both combined.

The first part of the report’s results, released back in August, showed similar disparity. The most popular definition for DevOps was “developers and system administrators collaborating to ease the transition between development and production” (84%), compared to 69% opting for “using infrastructure automation to facilitate self-service provisioning of infrastructure by development teams.”

Even if the definition is not quite there, organisations are increasingly turning to DevOps to identify defects before they get into production. More than half (56%) of businesses identify issues either once the application has been deployed to production, or during QA and validation, which takes on average five days to resolve.

Yet 46% of teams admit they experience delays waiting for testing and development data environments. The result is that teams are often working against data security constraints, with four in 10 respondents admitting developers and QA personnel are given unaudited access to production data.

“The pace at which companies need to securely deliver and update applications has increased drastically over the last few years,” said Iain Chidgey, VP international sales at 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.”

You can find more about the 2015 State of DevOps report here.