Imagine your developers are the quickest relay team in the globe. They are the fastest on the track in terms of design, testing, and qualification. Unfortunately, the finish line is concealed outside of the stadium. You are now beginning to grasp regulated DevOps.
How did they end up participating in this ridiculous race? Well, improved tools and practices have precipitated a radical shift from annual software releases to a world where teams can deploy multiple times per day.
Compliance standards must still be adhered to by DevOps teams in industries such as fintech, automotive, and healthcare. No longer applicable are effective change management processes for annual releases.
Change management, unlike construction, testing, and security, has not adopted automation. This suggests that it is becoming a hindrance for regulated teams, prompting the question of how to resolve the issue.
How can a culture of compliance be integrated into DevOps?
Important observations
- DevOps produces volumes of change that IT cannot manage effectively
- External software release approvals are sluggish and risky
- Compliance integration within DevOps permits quicker and more efficient release cycles
What impact does DevOps have on compliance and change management?
Understanding the impact of DevOps on technology organizations is complicated by the plethora of change management and compliance definitions.
Managing change and assuring compliance have always been the IT department’s primary responsibilities. Typically, the ITIL framework is consulted for guidance on how to manage alterations to IT systems. There are numerous change categories that must be managed.
Infrastructure, server, and hardware modifications, data migrations, enterprise resource planning, web updates, and performance improvements are included. Historically, this was all referred to in a broad sense as “change management.”
Compliance is a related, expansive concept that encompasses a variety of IT-related topics. There is open source compliance, policy compliance, industry standards compliance, internal standards compliance, regulations compliance, etc.
Change administration during delivery of software
DevOps has a significant impact on the software release process, which is a component of change management and compliance.
In regulated industries, production teams must be aware of the source and software being utilized. To ensure that their production process is compliant, they must monitor and record all production changes.
The IT department’s change management responsibilities necessarily included software releases.
Prior to the introduction of DevOps, this made a lot of sense.
You would draft a large number of changes, submit a change request to a change advisory board (CAB), receive their approval, and then disseminate the changes over a holiday weekend, just in case something went wrong. Extensive manual approval procedures were in place to mitigate risk.
It is worse than having no transformation whatsoever
Even in terms of risk mitigation, these procedures are inadequate. Extensive DevOps research has led to the discovery of the following: “External approvals correlated negatively with advance time, deployment frequency, and recuperation time, but not with change failure rate. In conclusion, approval by an external entity (such as a manager or CAB) has no effect on the stability of production systems, as measured by the time to restore service and the change in failure rate. However, this significantly impedes progress. It is even worse than having no approval process at all” Consequently, not only is it sluggish, but it is also dangerous. Considering the increasingly dynamic methods of software delivery, it is evident that the traditional approaches to change management are not only inefficient, but potentially catastrophic.
DevOps and manual process change automation
Continuous delivery and DevOps produce volumes of change that the IT department was never intended to manage. How should IT effectively manage software releases when DevOps teams deliver hundreds of modifications per day? How can meaningful compliance be ensured if highly automated software delivery pipelines are manually stamped?
ITIL is ineffectual for DevOps, as discussed in a related post. No amount of requests, manual approvals, CAB meetings, or documentation can effectively manage change at these volumes.
What occurs when the IT department delegates software release administration to DevOps teams?
IT should concentrate on its assets, such as server management, migrations, and hardware management. For dynamic software delivery methods, DevOps teams require their own change management automation.
Developing a DevOps culture that places a premium on compliance
There are no traditional divisions between software development, quality assurance, and IT Operations in modern technology organizations. This has been supplanted with cross-functional DevOps teams accountable for a software system’s entire value stream. This new DevOps methodology enables companies to reduce handoffs, enhance collaboration, and ultimately produce more innovation.
As organizations develop, so do their supporting technology strategies. In addition to metered cloud infrastructure as a service, businesses are employing automated build, test, and security tools. With this automated DevOps delivery, high-performing teams can implement changes 973 times more often than other teams.
What should companies do if compliance is required but external approvals and administration are ineffective?
Continuous Compliance, Continuous Delivery, and Continuous Integration
This significant increase in changes necessitates innovative and improved software process compliance and change management techniques. In order to support DevOps teams, organizations must replace manual and gated checks with continuous, automated checks. Compliance requires the application of the acquired principles of continuous integration and continuous delivery.
Using this method, teams can increase not only their productivity but also their conformity.
Implementing automated testing does not render evaluators obsolete. Instead, it eliminates monotonous and repetitious tasks so that testers can focus on higher-level exploratory testing.
Similarly, Continuous Compliance does not signal the end of compliance work; rather, it enables compliance officers to focus on investigations with greater value.
The advantages of adopting a DevOps Compliance Culture
The DevOps principles of culture, automation, lean, measurement, and collaboration can assist teams in increasing compliance activities and decreasing waste. The following are the five main advantages of adopting a DevOps Compliance Culture:
- Culture: gives teams agency to lead risk management responsibilities
- Automation: drives higher compliance conformance and reduces waste
- Lean: results in continuous improvement in risk control posture
- Measurement: ensures compliance becomes data-driven
- Sharing: makes compliance work visible to empower compliance and security functions
DevOps teams must cultivate a culture of conformity, especially if they are releasing software in a regulated industry. As part of DevOps, regulated teams must automate change management in order to quickly and compliantly release software.