Larger organisations more likely to push ahead with DevOps initiatives, research argues

(c)iStock.com/Yuri_Arcurs

Almost half of respondents in a new study from Redgate Software say they have adopted a DevOps approach to their projects – with a further third planning to join them within the next two years.

The study, the firm’s latest State of Database DevOps survey, polled 1,000 companies globally with more than half employing at least 500 people. While 47% polled overall said they are already on the road with DevOps initiatives, this number rises to 59% among companies with more than 10,000 employees.

IT services and retail are the industries most likely to favour DevOps, alongside finance and healthcare, while government, education and non-profit are the laggards, according to the research. Only one in five respondents said they are applying practices such as continuous delivery to their databases and their applications.

The biggest problem businesses looking at initiating DevOps face, according to the study, is a lack of appropriate skills. For those with no intentions to move over right now, the major hurdles remain a lack of awareness of business benefits, as well as not enough budget to spend on new tooling.

Naturally, any move towards DevOps benefits different job roles in various ways. Redgate argues that developers are on board because they want to be freed to do more value-added work, while database admins are more driven by collaborating between development and operations teams, as well as the need to reduce application downtime.

For Redgate, the results are somewhat unsurprising. “We’ve been helping our customers to improve the way they make changes to their databases for over 17 years now,” said Kate Duggan, Redgate product marketing manager. “This survey has highlighted that our customers are facing increasing pressure to speed up the delivery of software, and include the databases in the same processes they use for their applications. It means we can ensure we’re in a good position to help them overcome the particular challenges the database brings.”

You can read the full report here (registration required).