Businesses are always looking for different ways to get ahead, beat their competition and improve their operations. There is plenty of competition among businesses and it can be fierce. This is especially true when it comes to companies that release software, apps or programs. The software market is growing by billions of dollars every single year and there are more and more players entering the space. As a result, companies need to be looking to advance and innovate whenever they can.

One of the methods and practices that is growing in popularity recently is DevOps. DevOps is essentially a model and a set of practices that looks to combine operations with software development. The goal here is to shorten the development life cycle and allow for the rapid release and update of products. The quicker things can be developed and released, the faster they can reach your customers.

However, while it can certainly help businesses succeed, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies for DevOps. There will be some challenges to its widespread adoption and not every company will be able to implement it quickly and easily. With that in mind, this article is going to go over a few of the biggest challenges that DevOps will likely face in 2020.

Trying to do Too Much, Too Quickly

As with any major change at a company, it is important to implement it gradually. This gives employees, customers and anyone else with a role in your company to understand something before having to use it every day. If you simply switch everything over to DevOps in one day or one week, it could be pandemonium.

People won’t be aware of what to do, will be confused about the benefits and might resent the entire change as a result. Generally, it is best to begin by switch a project or a couple of projects over to DevOps and see how that works. Then, over time, begin to implement DevOps practices in more and more ways.

Security

Security is more important for companies than ever before. Hacks and data breaches are occurring more than ever, and affecting everyone from small businesses to the largest companies on the planet. Not only can these lead to a bad company reputation, but they could cost you millions. While there are tools that can help increase your security, such as log analyzers (https://www.papertrail.com/solution/iis-log-analyzer/), security challenges can still persist. 

As you could imagine, there are also some potential security challenges for DevOps as well. First of all, many security teams will struggle to keep up with the rapid pace of DevOps, which could lead to some things slipping through the cracks. Also, many DevOps-related tools are quite new and thus, could be vulnerable or untested in certain areas, which could leave them prone to security concerns.

Getting Everyone to Agree to it

Within many companies, switching to DevOps will represent a huge change. As you can imagine, not everyone is open to change. People who have been at your company for a while and are used to their specific roles and routines may not be very open to a change. Everyone from developers, to IT professionals, to executives will likely see their roles change.

A great way to get everyone onboard with the change is to make sure everyone is aware of the eventual benefits it will bring, and has access to all the help and information they need when making the switch. If you just try to make the change without explaining why, people are likely to resist.  While you could simply force everyone over to DevOps, this could be terrible for morale and will surely affect the working efficiency of the unwilling. This could even lead some people to leave.

In conclusion, hopefully this blog post has been able to help show you some of the biggest challenges facing DevOps in 2020.