DEVOPSdigest

Having the highest DevOps adoption of all industry sectors, using more database types in development, and moving to the cloud faster are key factors in the strong business performance of the Technology sector over the last year.

The Technology sector is a standout which, in a year of disruption and change for every business, 69% of IT professionals saw growth above or in line with expectations, compared to 55% across other sectors, according to the latest State of Database DevOps survey from Redgate Software.

The pandemic highlighted the importance of technology to business continuity, with many organizations and companies adapting their business model to serve customers remotely and in different ways, often turning to technology to spearhead the change.

The Technology sector was well prepared with, for example, DevOps adoption rates at 85% compared to 74% elsewhere, and 66% hosting their database mostly or all in the cloud, as against 58% in other sectors.

This increased use of DevOps is demonstrated in the higher take-up of automation in the development process, with Technology businesses ahead of every other in their use of version control, and automated builds, unit tests and deployments.

There is a caveat, however. While 21% of Technology businesses release database changes once a day or multiple times a day compared to 15% across all sectors, 75% of IT professionals in the sector noticed that up to 10% of their deployments require hotfixes compared to 73% across other sectors. In other words, the need to release changes faster appears to be contributing to more of those releases needing hotfixes, despite the processes and tools being better understood and utilized.

Technology businesses have come to recognize this and are now focusing their efforts on addressing three major challenges when integrating database changes into a DevOps process: synchronizing application and database changes; overcoming different development approaches; and ensuring business-critical data is preserved and protected.