Owners of successful software development businesses and startup investors may know that implementing new changes, best practices in software development, operations, and management are vital to keeping up with rapid changes in the technology industry, client demand, etc. And one of them is successfully attuning DevOps and NetOps for maximum efficiency.

Before moving to the benefits of merging NetOps and DevOps, let’s consider their advantages separately.

What’s DevOps

DevOps — aligning together two groups of tech organizations that are inclined to disagree with one another. These groups are software development and operations. Development is oriented primarily on new feature releases, fixing bugs, making changes in applications, whereas IT operations strive for stability and availability. As a result of this confrontation, we have two opposing forces.

The main advantages of DevOps for every company are speed and quality of software development. First, how fast a product is developed from the idea conception to its deployment and monitoring. Second, ensuring the high quality of the product.

All in all, speed and quality are the two constituents that are integral to any IT business. And to align these two together for optimal results, we bring operations and software development together.

Earlier, DevOps focused on merging development, testing, and computing in order to increase the speed of the time-to-market of applications, the productivity of development teams. But as more and more companies are using DevOps in application production these days, this methodology is becoming increasingly popular.

What’s NetOps

NetOps is a combination of network and operations. It’s an approach that includes people, special skills, and tools to provide end-users with a network of services. The main advantage of NetOps is aligning the changes of a product or service with changes in the network by improving its agility. The responsible teams have to scale, configure, and secure network infrastructure by reacting rapidly to dynamic changes and requirements for integration, security, and workload.

NetOps is a gradual process that involves many changes in an IT company’s culture and structure. One such change is network automation, which will help companies deploy and support new features quickly and provide further improvements without interruptions.

NetOps and DevOps are two methodologies in networking and development respectively that can be merged to bring the most value to the business. And how can companies use DevOps and NetOps to reap the most benefits? One of the best answers is given by Cisco, a corporate leader in technology. NetOps incorporates DevOps by bringing into network operations its core concepts such as automation, orchestration, and visualization, making DevOps an integral part of NetOps. Such an approach contributes to greater data transparency.

The rapid software development process, best practices in technology, cloud computing infrastructure, microservices — they all have been used to create software solutions in the most effective and efficient ways. Innovation and speed require agile teams, development, and management processes, and automation.

All in all, merging DevOps and NetOps brings to business the next benefits in the face of IT culture — alignment of application parameters with physical and logical development of the network, automation — increases speed and reduce manual work, performance — automation, enhanced IT culture, they all have a great impact on performance.

Key Takeaways

1. Stay Curious

“Stay curious, keep learning and keep growing.” Keeping an eye on the new technologies and market trends is vital for those willing to stay ahead of the competition. The pace of innovation is unprecedented, which means the only way to survive in the current business environment is to stay hungry for new ideas, experiment with new techs, and always search for innovative solutions.

2. Hire Right Talents

Hiring experienced talents is beneficial not only for development but also for broadening your horizons. A team of professional engineers will update you on the latest innovations and streamline the development processes. If hiring in-house developers is not impossible due to budget constraints, consider outsourcing as a perfect solution.

There are lots of outsourcing partners out there providing development services of a decent quality. This way, you get a reliable and experienced team interested in your success and dedicated to creating a high-quality software product. Thus, when it comes to DevOps and NetOps, I’d advise you consider this option.

3. MLOps

Data science and machine learning have equipped engineers with techniques and tools to automate continuous integration and deployment. Large datasets, on-demand computing resources, and specialized accelerators have evolved to make the development process even more efficient.

From a business perspective, MLOps can boost performance and cut costs. By delegating the integration and deployment to ML systems, business owners won’t require an extended team of engineers, making ML more accessible to small and medium-sized businesses.

4. Think Outside The Box

DevOps and NetOps are just a few of the matters founders should delve into to ensure they keep an eye on all the innovations and changes taking place on the market. Thus, there are two options you can go with: focus on self-study and learn more about new techs emerging each month or hire an experienced team of engineers to do it for you.

Given the range of tasks and direction business owners should focus on, the second option seems to be more efficient and time-saving.

Wrapping up

Merging DevOps and NetOps together is a daunting task, so don’t rush to change everything within your company right away. Take small steps at first. You can go with the culture — make changes to your teams, overall culture, create cross-functional teams.

Then, move to technology and tools. There are plenty of automation software solutions that will support you on your way to merging DevOps and NetOps. Pick up the ones that you think will be more beneficial to your business and that will decrease human intervention and manual work. And finally, finish with the right skillset. Raise specialists that will be knowledgeable in how to utilize DevOps and NetOps effectively.