Businesses deploy technology in search of the 'continuous enterprise'

Today's technology companies are focused on delivering new ideas fast, resulting in systems being rebuilt around the needs of developers, and companies piloting and adopting new technologies like microservices and containers in search of speed.

Automation specialist Chef Software has released the results of a survey of over 1,500 IT practitioners and decision-makers across app, infrastructure, security and cross-functional teams. The findings show technology rollout increasing faster than headcount.

They also reveal that a new breed of cross-functional teams is emerging as the fastest, most forward-looking way of pursuing a continuous enterprise model which seeks to integrate apps and processes into the business.

While 63 percent of respondents see their workloads increasing, only 44 percent expect to see an increase in the size of their development teams and only a third in the size of their operations teams.

According to respondents, development teams are 33 percent more likely than operations teams to grow in size in the next year. More than a third (36 percent) of respondents say their company plans to increase the size of their development team by between one and two times. Eight percent report three times growth to development teams and 32 percent say the team size will remain stable.

Compliance issues remain somewhat at odds with speed of development, with 73 percent of respondents waiting to assess compliance until after development work has begun, and 59 percent assessing compliance only once code is already running in production.

Three quarters of respondents review the state of their compliance policies on a quarterly (or longer) basis, with 46 percent making assessments at an inconsistent rate or not at all. Security teams are the most likely to assess in production (22 percent) or just prior to releasing to production (17 percent), whereas application, infrastructure and cross-functional teams most often assess for compliance in the development phase (25 percent, 26 percent and 23 percent respectively).

"For me, the interesting part of this data set is that we're seeing both current challenges and potential solutions," says George Miranda product marketing director at Chef. "We see that maintaining flexibility is not only an essential part of any solution that manages our hybrid infrastructure and applications, but teams that promote that same hybrid approach in experience lead the pack when it comes to addressing these challenges."

You can read more about the findings on the Chef blog and there's an infographic summary below.

Image Credit: Sergey Nivens / Shutterstock