Cost and complexity are top barriers to DevOps adoption

While DevOps seems to be flavor of the month with many organizations, the path to adoption is not necessarily a smooth one.

Intelligent SaaS specialist Pensa has conducted a survey of more than 200 IT decision makers with a view to identifying the biggest challenges they face in the adoption of DevOps practices.

Limited budgets are cited as the top barrier to DevOps success by 19.7 percent of respondents. This is followed closely by the constraints of legacy systems (17.2 percent), application complexity (12.8 percent), difficulty managing multiple environments (11.3 percent), and company culture (9.4 percent).

Other barriers for DevOps projects are ranked as the challenges of testing automation (7.9 percent), limited IT skills (7.9 percent), and the lack of executive buy-in (7.4 percent), which is closely related to company culture.

For those projects that are already underway, the survey shows they are mostly active on public clouds including Microsoft Azure (30.5 percent) and Amazon Web Services (26.6). Many others are using virtualization platforms including VMware virtualization (19.2 percent), Microsoft virtualization (15.3 percent), and OpenStack (7.4 percent).

"Our initial DevOps survey reveals the biggest barriers to DevOps success involve the cost and complexity of transforming legacy IT environments into complete software-defined data centers, including compute, networking, storage, security, and applications," says Pensa CEO Tom Joyce. "We also found that IT managers are committed to deploying DevOps on a range of platforms including public cloud, private cloud and on-premise virtualization, rather than being beholden to any single DevOps platform."

The survey results coincide with the launch of Pensa's core technology, Pensa Maestro. This is a cloud-based system that enables enterprises to rapidly create multi-vendor, multi-platform software-based IT environments to support any application in a secure manner. You can find out more on the company's website.

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