DevOps Outsourcing Guide: How It Works, Challenges & Strategy

Guest Blog by : Harikrishna Kundariya, eSparkBiz Technologies

In today’s fast world of digitalization, constant pressure is put upon businesses to produce quality products at the right time and in the most efficient manner. Adopting DevOps would bring together both sides: development and IT operations for improved collaboration, automation, and eventually, efficiency in software delivery. However, outsourcing these DevOps functions can work well for most companies, particularly those that lack resources. This DevOps outsourcing guide will define how it works, the challenges involved, and finally, the strategy for a successful outsourcing partnership.

What is DevOps Outsourcing?

DevOps outsourcing is an agreement where a part of the functions or processes related to DevOps is outsourced to other third-party service providers, who are usually DevOps companies or teams specialized in this kind of management. This is the outsourcing of DevOps by the company, which would make the companies focus mainly on their core business activity without keeping an in-house team for DevOps but attains the latest tools and technologies.

Why DevOps Outsourcing?

Outsourcing DevOps gives various advantages to a business. The main advantages are that:

Economically Efficient: House-built DevOps teams often have a high cost for recruitment and building up the staff. Outsourced arrangements allow businesses to pay only for the service that they need them to offer and avoid overhead costs altogether.

Specialized Knowledge Access: DevOps is a space that demands knowledge in various tools, technologies, and best practices. Outsourcing will make available a readymade team of experts who keep themselves updated on trends and the latest technology in the market.

Scalability and Flexibility: Outsourcing is a very easy way to upscale or downscale according to needs. Be it for some short-term or any long-term collaboration, firms can upscale resources.

Faster Time-to-Market: DevOps practices include continuous integration and continuous delivery, which enable faster cycles of development. Outsource these and it is possible to deliver software in a much quicker time frame and time-to-market.

Focus on core competencies: Organizations can concentrate on their core business competencies, such as developing products, providing customer services, or marketing, and sending the technical complexities to professionals.

How Does DevOps Outsourcing Work?

The outsourced DevOps may be a shared relationship between the business and the service provider of the third party. The engagement process includes:

1. Appraisal and Planning

Both parties have to analyze the present DevOps practices, infrastructure, and goals of the organization before they begin the outsourcing engagement. The business has to decide what it wants to outsource, like continuous integration, infrastructure management, cloud computing, etc., and then communicate its requirements to the DevOps provider clearly.

In this stage, the provider also examines the current development and operation processes of the organization to understand its pain points and bottlenecks. Once they have done that, they can create a strategy for the adoption of DevOps practices.

2. Tool and technology selection

Outsourcing DevOps refers to the choice of a set of tools and technologies selected to meet the organization’s needs. The third-party service provider will propose the relevant tools for automation, continuous integration, monitoring, version control, containerization, etc. The choice may depend upon the complexity of the project so that the third-party vendor may suggest open-source options, commercial tools, or a combination of both options.

3. Implementation and Integration

After selecting the right tools, the outsourcing team starts the implementation and integration of DevOps practices into the existing business infrastructure. This may include the implementation of the CI/CD pipeline as well as automating previously manual processes or cloud services management, thus creating smooth and continuous processes of development and deployment where the organization can release its software faster and more securely.

4. Monitoring and Continuous Improvement

DevOps is the process through which the outsourcing provider always keeps monitoring the software and the infrastructure for optimal performance post the initial implementation. This would include tracking application performance, server health, and so on with monitoring tools. The provider improves and optimizes the system based on the insights obtained through the metrics by making constant improvements.

5. Team and communication

Good communication and collaboration are the secret of any outsourcing relationship’s secret. Both business and provider should remain in touch, with regular updates with meetings and feedback loops over the DevOps outsourcing to help in addressing all problems that come up and that also ensures that the teams keep in line with the goals and timelines of the project.

Challenges of DevOps Outsourcing

While outsourcing DevOps brings several benefits, the same thing comes with a set of challenges. With outsourcing, some issues should be addressed before businesses seek the services of an outsourcing partner.

1. Quality Control and Accountability

The most critical issue with outsourcing DevOps is loss of quality control. Since the set of processes and tools is infinitely complex, it becomes too challenging to check if the outsourced team upholds the organization’s standards. A clear need for this exists, and then implementation should be done with consistent follow-through, like regular monitoring of the provider’s work, to uphold the quality.

2. Security Threats

Outsourcing DevOps means the third party gets sensitive data and systems, which raises serious security and data privacy issues. Thus, a good outsourcing partner who practices best security practices and complies with appropriate data-protection regulations, such as GDPR, HIPAA, etc., must be selected.

3. Cultural and Communication Barriers

An external team working from another time zone or region introduces cultural and communication barriers, which can influence the team’s collaboration on the project and delay timelines. Business needs to develop clear communication channels, have frequent check-ins, and ensure that both teams are on the same page concerning the project goals and timelines.

4. Loss of Control

Sometimes, the most obvious risk of outsourcing is loss of control over development. With the business now depending on an external team for most of its essential operations, it may get disoriented from the grass-roots work. As such, businesses should not only ensure open lines of communication and regular feedback, but the provider should be aligned with the organization’s vision as well.

5. Integration into existing systems

Integrating outsourced DevOps practices into the organization’s existing infrastructure is rather difficult when legacy systems are involved. Businesses have to collaborate closely with the provider to integrate them as seamlessly as possible and minimize disruption to existing workflows.

Strategies for Successful DevOps Outsourcing

Despite all such challenges, business companies should maximize DevOps outsourcing while at the same time taking full steps to minimize any difficulty involved.

1. Goals and expectations should be clearly defined

The first step of any outsourcing relationship is clear objectives. Businesses should define well what they expect to see from DevOps outsourcing or how fast the software delivery shall be, quality improvement, or cost reduction. These shall be communicated to the outsourced service provider to be matched with them.

2. Choosing the Ideal Partner

The right DevOps outsourcing partner can make or break a project. Ideally, choose a provider who has implemented DevOps solutions to other organizations and specializes in the industry where your business is present. A provider will be able to express better how they have handled technically proficient solutions that integrate DevOps practices as well as experience in similar business conditions.

3. Establish Strong Communication Networks

One effective principal key into outsourcing is communication that remains opened through an update and by calls done within regular meetings shared by various parties. And here might be the route for exploitations through using services offered by Slack and even a Microsoft Team alongside many of the project apps in conducting communications from other time zones across continents leading to widespread connectivity.

4. Security and compliance based on principles

Outsourced DevOps should not compromise security issues. All the requirements related to security should be discussed with the outsourcing provider and the user, which will be established in advance. Outsourcing providers must have the industry best practices for the protection of data so should not breach data confidentiality and may face non-compliance cases.

5. Measure performance and set metrics tracking

There would also be a monitoring requirement from the outsourced DevOps team to keep the project on track. There will be clear KPIs and metrics set to gauge the success of the engagement. The metrics would often be reviewed to establish any grounds of improvement and changes will thus be implemented.

Conclusion

Outsourcing is a valuable option for any organization seeking to streamline its software development processes, reduce costs, and gain access to specialized expertise. As a result, this outsourced model enables organizations to hire DevOps engineers who are masters at automation, continuous integration, continuous delivery, infrastructure as code, monitoring, and other key DevOps practices. If one knows how it works, is aware of the challenges, and uses the right strategies, then businesses will successfully use DevOps outsourcing in the delivery of software faster and more efficiently. The key to success would be finding the right outsourcing partner, keeping clear communication, and keeping long-term goals and continuous improvement in mind.

Written By : Harikrishna Kundariya

Harikrishna Kundariya, a marketer, developer, IoT, Cloud & AWS savvy, co-founder, Director of eSparkBiz Technologies. His 14+ years of experience enables him to provide digital solutions to new start-ups based on IoT and SaaS applications.

August 23, 2021

Buy the Best Software for Your Business with These 5 Steps

Guest blog post by Gloria Martinez.

Too many entrepreneurs have purchased software after watching a slick demo only to experience buyer’s remorse soon after. As a business owner, you want to buy software that delivers the value it promises, whether you buy it off the shelf or on a subscription basis.

This article shows you five crucial steps to buying software that fits your budget and needs:

Assess your needs
Seek buy-in
Compare multiple options
Mind the cost
Pick a solution

Continuous Testing Blog from Eran Kinsbruner invites you to read on to find out more.

Assess Your Needs

Buying decisions that take into account all the facts result in satisfactory software purchases. Assess your needs before you make a substantial investment in software for your business. For example, if you’re looking to register your business as an LLC, then you may want to work with an online formation service that can help you correctly file the paperwork. You can call the Z en B usiness phone number to learn more about the process.

It’s important to break down which software and/or services will best serve your business before you consider purchasing anything, especially when you’re operating on a very tight budget.

Get Buy-In From Stakeholders

As the owner of the business, you may have the authority to make a unilateral decision on what software to buy. Still, it’s important to get buy-in from your employees, managers, IT team, and customers. Carrying out a comprehensive needs assessment helps achieve buy-in from all these stakeholders.

Take into account how implementing new software or replacing your current system will affect your processes, habits, hardware, and work culture. Purchasing new software often leads to significant changes in your operations. Let your employees know how these changes will affect them so they’re well-prepared to adjust.

Compare Prospective Software Solutions

Once you get stakeholder buy-in, start reviewing prospective software solutions. Narrow down to a few top-tier software providers. Your exclusion process should rely on questions based on the needs you identified in your needs assessment.

Here are a few examples of questions to guide you:

What are your must-have and nice-to-have features?
How much data storage do you require?
How much customer support will you need?
Do you want an on-site or cloud-based solution?
How scalable is the software?

Your budget also determines the software solutions you consider. A feature such as live chat support may drive up the price but may be worth the investment.

Consider the Cost

Research all the costs involved in purchasing and implementing the software to ensure you’re prepared. Here are a few considerations to make.

Is the software available as a one-time purchase or SaaS solution?
For SaaS solutions, does the provider offer a discount for annual billing?
Does the contract, if any, include an early cancellation penalty?
How much will it cost to scale up?
Is support billed separately?

Getting answers to these and other salient questions ensures you purchase software that fits your needs and budget.

Choose a Solution

You’ve whittled down your shortlist to one or two suitable software solutions. Take a multi-pronged approach to ensure you get the solution all stakeholders will find satisfactory.

Use a trial period to test the software.
Research the vendor by reading customer reviews.
Ask your industry peers who use the software their thoughts on it.

Again, consult your needs assessment to determine what trade-offs you’re willing to make.

As a business owner, your bottom line is an essential KPI. You want to optimize the returns on your software investment. The steps outlined in this article will help you buy the best software for your business.

This is a guest blog post by Gloria Martinez.

Gloria loves sharing her business expertise and hopes to inspire other women to start their own businesses and seek promotions in the workplace. She created WomenLed.org to spotlight and celebrate women’s achievements

August 11, 2021

Understanding The Role Of Software Testing In Cyber Security

Gust Blog by: Kanika Vatsyayan is Vice-President – Delivery and Operations at BugRaptors

Over the years, Cyber Security has become a highly sensitive and significant aspect of the IT industry. And it is very natural with hackers leaning on some more advanced approaches to breach public and private networks inspecting the personal information of various organizations.

Most importantly, these cyber-attacks have the potential to feed on business data from any small or large organization using high-end technology to attack digital systems. As per the reports by weforum, approximately $5.2 trillion worth of data would be put at stake because of cyber-attacks from 2019 to 2023.

However, software testing has emerged to be a practice that has helped streamline the cybersecurity factor restricting hacking and diminishing the chances of any threat to data. In other words, software security testing services has turned to be a trusted shield against cyber-attacks and therefore has gained extensive popularity amongst the IT sector.

Importance of Software Testing

With past incidences like the WannaCry ransomware attack of 2017 and the Yahoo breach of 2013, organizations are at constant threat of cyber breaches, deploying a perfect software testing strategy should be an ideal agenda to keep things protected. However, the limited propagation has made security testing an even more complex process to understand.

Above all, there exists a significant irony in the current approach towards software testing for cybersecurity as the present focus of the development enthusiasts is centered around the new development practices. This cuts the scope of improvement for already released technologies and makes them more vulnerable to hacking due to major security gaps.

Thus, there is an immediate need to realize the current circumstances and make continuous software testing and DevOps an essential part of the organization’s development practices to improve the entire working propaganda. However, the process needs companies to immediately locate software testing professionals to help with planning the cybersecurity initiatives while driving quality throughout the project pipeline.

Also, the adoption of security testing services would not only aid the security process against unexpected cyber-attacks to industries like healthcare, finance, banking, etc. while improving the entire development design. In a nutshell, the right approach towards software testing could help drive a mature security practice that will run through different stages of the development lifecycle while aligning with cybersecurity objectives.

Penetration Testing & Its Importance For Cyber Security

Over the years, different surveys have revealed that 75 percent of cyber-attacks happen due to insecure code that makes the application unstable. Also, the shift of all the operational processes, as well as day to day tasks to third party applications that have access to global user data, have become the prime spot for cyber attackers.

Therefore, it is necessary that your developers, as well as security testing service provider in India, both aim at improving the source code quality for any tasks that involve the use of data. However, the process to overcome any such code issues require correct implementation of the techniques like penetration testing as it works on how the code connects with the application.

Penetration testing is a technique that highly resembles a cyber-attack or actually an intentional cyber-attack made on the application to identify all the system vulnerabilities. Moreover, penetration testing is a highly effective practice that helps meet the goals related to web application security as it helps to improve the Web Application Firewall or WAF protection.

Intelligent System Security Checks

Penetration testing is more of a test design arrangement made to work on security against any attempt made on hacking. Even the tools used during penetration testing are made to replicate the cyber-attacks with the objective of getting over any system vulnerabilities.

Underline Weak Segments

Another significant aspect of using the penetration testing approach is to identify weak links within the software code. The practice improves the scope for protecting the personal user data, card details, or any transactional record that might be at threat. In short, penetration testing works by analyzing the security vulnerabilities of the system and use them in strengthening the system structure against possible cyber threats.

Added Network Security

Penetration testing is a powerful technique that could help developers and software testers to work on improving the high-speed internet like 5G network security as well as applications running on the network. When implemented through a dynamic approach, penetration testing could help the users to identify any potential vulnerabilities related to the system for preventing any chances of attack. Also, the security-related information can be used to work on compliance goals and plan the security response time to make system protection more definite.

The Crux: Planning Cyber Security With Software Testing

Though penetration testing is a highly efficient software testing practice that is made to simplify the test operations related to cybersecurity, running through other dimensions of testing could help make things better.

For instance, pen testers could consider escalating their cybersecurity initiatives by using advanced cyber penetration techniques. This would not only help make the system more secure but have a complete idea of the likely cyber-attacks that could be planned in the near future. Such arrangement allows tracking of methods that can be imposed by attackers and therefore can be used to prevent any hacking incidents.

All in all, working on the cybersecurity component of software testing is a sophisticated practice that needs testers to analyze all the aspects of the technical landscape. It is not only made to expose potential attacks before they occur but rather uses a similar set of tools and approaches that can be used by hackers. Furthermore, it cuts off the chances of any security compromises that may happen with devices running on public networks.

In a nutshell, software testing has redefined the entire concept of cybersecurity, offering solid protection to the user data as well as development companies. Thus, it is crucial that development firms should start recognizing the importance of software security testing services in the organization when they need to put off any prospective threats as it will not only help users to experience the best of the web but development companies to enjoy sustainable growth.

All the best!

Author Bio: Kanika Vatsyayan is Vice-President – Delivery and Operations at BugRaptors who oversees all the quality control and assurance strategies for client engagements. She loves to share her knowledge with others through blogging. Being a voracious blogger, she published countless informative blogs to educate audience about automation and manual testing.