As enterprise IT environments continue to grow in complexity, organizations are modernizing legacy applications and workloads, amongst other strategic IT initiatives, to address various IT and business challenges—including cost optimization, simplification, time to market, technical debt, scale and more.
Along the way, they are adopting new technologies and infrastructure that have to be incorporated into the application development and delivery process. Powerful DevOps and automation tools, as well as serverless infrastructure and managed container solutions, are more accessible than ever. The hard part is knowing how to effectively combine these technologies to achieve tangible results, most notably on established transactional systems like the mainframe.
Recent survey data from Forrester highlights the significant impacts of IT modernization challenges: 44% of decision-makers report delayed timelines, one-third cite reduced productivity, and 40% note increased operating costs. These hurdles stem, in part, from the growing complexity of application development and deployment processes as the speed of business continues to accelerate. As organizations strive to modernize applications, an effective and automated DevOps toolchain becomes critical.
3 keys to success: visibility, automation, and orchestration
Complete visibility into the end-to-end application development lifecycle is essential for organizations to be successful in their modernization journeys. It’s what enables teams to identify problems and spot misconfigured resources that detract from operational efficiency. Visibility also gives engineers a clearer sense of how new features or processes will impact the larger picture. Once end-to-end visibility exists, leaders can automate their DevOps processes with better precision.
Considering the growing number of tasks, processes, and accelerated development timeframes teams must work with, automation has a critical role. Leveraging automation takes much of the burden of managing repetitive, tedious, and time-consuming processes from development teams. When companies get automation right, they can significantly reduce complexity and mitigate risk. They can catch inefficiencies, improve reliability, and accelerate new feature delivery. Automation also helps reduce costs and reallocate engineering time to more innovative endeavors. Those who use automation well can then focus on broader orchestration.
Service orchestration and automation platforms (SOAP), as they’re now being referred to, can kick off automations within the DevOps pipeline in one cloud and then initiate another set of activities in a different cloud or on the mainframe. With today’s tools, the possibilities are virtually endless. DevOps orchestration tools minimize human error and remove operational bottlenecks that would otherwise slow the entire IT operation. Combined with total IT visibility and automation, orchestration is what enables the level of coordination needed to upgrade application development and delivery across large, multi-platform IT footprints. Different technology teams can collaborate more effectively and partner on building the ideal end-to-end IT environment to serve the company’s needs.
Invest in an enterprise-grade workload automation solution
One of the best ways to improve visibility and leverage automation and DevOps orchestration is to invest in a purpose-built solution. Platforms like Rocket Software’s Rocket Workload Automation and DevOps Orchestration were designed for this exact reason. These solutions give development teams a robust set of capabilities to assess and manage development and deployment, with access to a centralized place for viewing business applications, operating systems, platforms, and DevOps tooling. This view captures mainframe, distributed, and cloud workloads.
The tools and technologies exist to elevate IT workload and DevOps automation dramatically. Companies can get more done with fewer resources than ever before by leveraging automation and orchestration. The key is being able to do this across IT footprints that are becoming increasingly complex and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. For those with limited experience in modernizing resources and building cohesive, multi-platform IT environments, working with a company like Rocket Software can accelerate the transition while maximizing return on investment.
Learn more about how Rocket Software can help you leverage the right tools to optimize the application development lifecycle, end to end.
