What do you do when you are a leader in DevOps solutions for Enterprise Systems and you practice what you preach? You raise the bar to continually improve your offerings and share thought leadership about where the future lies for clients as they navigate the world of continuous delivery in a climate of digital disruption.

The primary reason why most companies adopt DevOps is to reduce cycle times and to improve responsiveness to the market. This is accomplished by breaking down organizational and role-based silos and by allowing people across the end-to-end software lifecycle to work more closely together. While culture is the most tricky part of a DevOps transformation, tools play a major role in enabling information to rapidly flow across people and lifecycle phases, reducing manual and error prone steps, and alerting people of issues as early as possible so they can be addressed. A key feedback loop comes from development in small batches, where frequent compile, build, deploy, and test cycles, allow you to discover issues within hours of the code having been written.

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Which of the following best describes how you currently monitor and manage systems across your hybrid cloud environment?(Required)

Multiple separate tools for different environments

Multiple separate tools for different monitoring and management functions

Single consolidated dashboard

Custom built monitoring and management solution

No full monitoring and management solution

Don’t know

How valuable would it be for your monitoring and management solution to incorporate predictive analytics to help you identify and address system issues that are critical and not waste time or effort working through all the data and “noise” that is not critical?(Required)

Extremely valuable

Moderately valuable

Somewhat valuable

Slightly valuable

Not valuable

How do you most typically address potential system issues BEFORE they impact your operations?(Required)

Automated workflows and playbooks to remediate potential issues as soon as they are detected

An orchestrated response process that leverages automation, AI, and human expertise to rapidly respond to potential issues

Advanced monitoring tools such as predictive analytics and anomaly detection to proactively identify and address potential issues

Respond to issues as they arise, using manual processes and troubleshooting techniques

A combination of automated remediation, orchestrated response, and/or proactive monitoring to address potential system issues

Don’t know

Other

What methods does your organization use to control and monitor cloud/IT spending?(Required)

Centralized procurement processes

Pre-approved budget thresholds

Automated cost monitoring tools

Department-level spending controls

Regular cost audits and reviews

Cloud cost optimization platform

Approval workflows for resource provisioning

Native financial operations tools provided by the cloud provider

No formal controls in place

Don’t know

Other

Please specify:

Which methods do you rely on most to detect security vulnerabilities in your systems?(Required)

Automated scanning tools

Manual assessments

Vendor notifications

Threat modeling (for early detection)

None of these

Don’t know

Other

Please specify:

What are the TWO most common ways you prioritize vulnerabilities to address within your environment?(Required)

Based on potential impact

Based on exploitability

Regulatory compliance requirements

Based on CVSS scores

Risk-based analysis of multiple factors

First-in-first-out approach

No formal prioritization process

Don’t know

How do you typically handle system updates and security patches?(Required)

Automated updates and patches

Manually review and apply updates and patches on a regular schedule

A combination of automation and manual review

Apply updates and patches on an as-needed basis.

Outsourced update and patch management

No defined process

Don’t know

Other

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Over the last month, IBM has made major announcement improving our DevOps for Enterprise Systems solution to help our customers to more easily realize the value of DevOps. Here is a summary of the many announcements we have made.

• Integrated Suite: We announced the new Enterprise COBOL Suite, which provides one integrated suite of five tools targeting developers and systems programmers. The suite of tools allow you to do performance analysis, analyze abends, code and do unit testing, debug problems and manage complex files and data sets. Click here to see for the next level of details.
• Frequent build and release: Many customers have concerns that a transformation to DevOps may drive up their MIPS cost with frequent compile, build, deploy, and test cycles. To mitigate this concern, we announced the Enterprise COBOL VU Edition consisting of Enterprise COBOL for z/OS V5.2. This edition allows you to increase your compiles up to a factor of 10x without an increase in your MIPS cost.
• Integration Platform: In the blog All aboard the z/OS release train – Aqua is coming, my colleagues Kenichi Yoshimura (@kyosh1107) and Joe Winchester (@JoeWinchester) discussed how Explorer for z/OS Aqua has been expanded into an integration platform across the DevOps lifecycle, with initial capabilities for Development (RDz and PD Tools), Operations (CICS Tools), and Runtime (CICS Explorer). The Aqua release improves the user experience for application developer and system programmers, makes installation easier by allowing all of the above rich client tools to be installed using one installer, and makes deployment easier through push-to-client technology.
• Drinking our own Champagne: We have also built a brand new continuous build, deploy and test infrastructure that is shared across our tools running on our integration platform, Aqua. This allows us to build, deploy and test plug-ins across our integration platform to ensure that they are compatible before we make them available to you. This means higher productivity for our development teams and better quality for our customers.

The whole intent behind offering a suite of products with continuously improved end-to-end integration is to enable teams to realize the value of their DevOps investments more quickly. While we will continue to bring our “A” game to the Agile software delivery court,  I am interested in what innovations you see coming that would increase IT’s value to the business.

About The Author

Per Kroll is Director of DevOps for Enterprise solution in IBM zSystems Software unit, where he oversees offerings management, development and support. Per also co-leads a DevOps transformation of 2,000 developers within IBM zSystems Software unit. Per has focused on helping organizations improve how they develop software throughout his career. In past positions, Per drove development of the world’s most broadly adopted commercial process library (Rational Unified Process), development of a measurement framework, and lead an open source project centered on agile best practices. Per has also managed development organizations spanning a dozen countries, support, product marketing and product management organizations. Per has authored more than 30 articles and 2 books, sold in more than 30,000 copies and translated to 6 languages.

Follow Per Kroll on Twitter: @perkroll and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/perkroll