This article is based on a live webinar hosted by PCQuest in association with Datamato and IBM, originally published on pcquest.com in May 2020. The webinar theme was “DevOps As a Key Differentiator,” focused on the BFSI (Banking, Financial Services and Insurance) and Retail sectors.
The Business Case for DevOps in a Crisis
The COVID-19 pandemic forced an almost overnight shift to remote work and social distancing, exposing deep fragility in organizations that relied on manual, human-intensive software delivery processes. The resulting challenges were immediate and severe: business disruption, cash flow problems, workforce reductions, and significant delays in IT delivery.
Yet not every organization struggled equally. According to Vrushank Salaskar, Vice President of Strategic Engagement at Datamato, businesses that already had DevOps practices and culture in place held a measurable advantage: “DevOps can make a difference in this scenario, because it reduces the dependence on humans, and the need to socially collaborate, and instead focuses on speed, agility, quality and automation to respond faster to the changing market demands.”
This is not simply a pandemic observation. Any crisis — whether a global health emergency, a sudden market shift, or a major infrastructure failure — tests an organization’s ability to deliver software rapidly and reliably without depending on physical co-location or manual handoffs. DevOps is precisely the discipline built to address that need.
How DevOps Addresses Crisis-Driven Disruption
DevOps, at its core, increases an organization’s ability to deliver applications and services faster than teams using traditional, siloed software development and infrastructure management approaches. During a crisis, this speed advantage becomes a survival advantage. Key capabilities that matter most include:
- Automation of repetitive tasks: Reducing the number of manual steps in a delivery pipeline means fewer blockers when team members are unavailable or distributed across home environments.
- Faster feedback loops: Continuous integration surfaces bugs early, reducing the cost and time of fixing defects under pressure.
- Resilient release processes: Automated deployment pipelines allow teams to push fixes and new features quickly and confidently, even when working asynchronously.
- Self-service environments: Developers can provision test and staging environments on demand, removing bottlenecks from ops teams who may be stretched thin.
The Role of CI/CD Pipeline Automation
A fully automated CI/CD (Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery) pipeline is the operational backbone of DevOps. During the webinar, Salaskar described how such a pipeline can encapsulate the entire software delivery lifecycle, including:
- Build and packaging
- Automated testing
- Infrastructure provisioning
- Application deployment and release
When every stage of delivery is automated, teams are no longer blocked by who is in the office, what manual approvals are pending, or whether a specific engineer is available to run a deployment script. This is especially critical when teams are suddenly working across different time zones and home setups.
Deployment Automation and Environment Provisioning
One practical implementation highlighted in the webinar involves IBM UrbanCode Deploy, a tool that addresses two specific DevOps use cases: deployment automation and environment provisioning.
Datamato developed an environment provisioning solution specifically for BFSI clients using IBM Blueprint Designer. The solution enables teams to replicate an application from one environment to another in a repeatable, automated fashion. According to the webinar presenters, this approach reduced migration time by 70–90 percent compared to manual migration processes.
For industries like banking and financial services — where environment parity, auditability, and security are non-negotiable — automating environment provisioning is particularly high-value. Manual environment setup is not only slow; it introduces configuration drift and compliance risk.
Application Modernization: Moving from Monolithic to Microservices
A crisis also tends to accelerate conversations about application modernization. Many enterprises still run core business logic on monolithic applications that are difficult to scale, update independently, or deploy frequently. Microservices architecture addresses these problems by breaking applications into smaller, independently deployable services.
However, the transition is not trivial. As Samit Shetty, Business Leader for ISA at IBM India, noted during the webinar: “Enterprises often face challenges to embark on this app modernization or cloud-native journey as they don’t have the skills or know-how of migrating from a monolithic to a microservices architecture.”
IBM Cloud Paks for Applications was cited as one solution that helps organizations both build new cloud-native applications and migrate existing core business applications to a cloud environment in a secure, open, and incremental manner.
The key principle here is that modernization does not have to be a big-bang rewrite. A strangler-fig pattern — gradually replacing parts of a monolith with microservices while keeping the existing system running — is a common and lower-risk approach that DevOps tooling and pipelines are well suited to support.
DevOps Culture Matters as Much as Tooling
A recurring theme from the webinar was a point that every experienced DevOps practitioner knows well: tools and technology alone are not enough. DevOps is a cultural transformation as much as a technical one.
Organizations that install CI/CD tooling but fail to train their people, change their workflows, or break down silos between development, operations, and security teams will not realize the full benefits. During a crisis, a half-implemented DevOps practice can actually create confusion — teams may not know how to use the tools effectively under pressure, or they may revert to manual workarounds.
Investing in DevOps training and organizational readiness before a crisis hits is what separates teams that respond effectively from those that are overwhelmed.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Teams
- Automate your delivery pipeline end-to-end so that deployment does not depend on any individual being physically present or available.
- Invest in environment provisioning automation to eliminate one of the most common bottlenecks in release cycles.
- Start your modernization journey incrementally — you do not need to rewrite everything to start gaining the benefits of cloud-native architecture.
- Treat DevOps as a cultural initiative, not just a toolchain purchase. Training, shared responsibility, and cross-functional collaboration are what make the tools work.
- Resilience is built before the crisis, not during it. Organizations that already had DevOps practices in place were better positioned to absorb sudden disruption.
Original reporting by PCQuest. Webinar hosted by PCQuest in association with Datamato and IBM.