This article summarises findings originally reported by SD Times, citing a research study published by CA Technologies (May 2017).
The Core Argument: Combination Beats Either Approach Alone
DevOps and cloud computing are each powerful levers for improving software delivery. But according to a study from CA Technologies, organisations that adopt both together see dramatically better results than those that rely on only one of the two approaches.
CA surveyed more than 900 senior IT professionals worldwide to understand how high-performing organisations were achieving software delivery success. The headline finding: 81% of respondents who combined DevOps methodologies with cloud-based tools and delivery mechanisms reported an overall improvement in software delivery performance, compared with:
- 52% who reported improvement using DevOps practices alone
- 53% who reported improvement using cloud tools alone
CA labelled these high-performing, combined-approach organisations “delivery disruptors”, contrasting them with “slow movers” — organisations still relying heavily on traditional IT delivery methods.
How Delivery Disruptors Outperform Slow Movers
The study quantified performance gaps between delivery disruptors and slow movers across four key dimensions:
| Dimension | Delivery Disruptors vs. Slow Movers |
|---|---|
| Speed | +90% |
| Predictability | +77% |
| Quality | +66% |
| Cost Control | +117% |
Beyond the headline numbers, delivery disruptors also reported benefits including:
- Greater end-to-end automation across the delivery pipeline
- Increased agility and flexibility in responding to change
- Improved time, scope and budget management
- Fewer defects in released software
- Measurably improved customer experience
Why the Combination Amplifies Results
DevOps and cloud computing address complementary problems. DevOps focuses on cultural change, collaboration between development and operations teams, and automating the software delivery lifecycle. Cloud platforms provide on-demand infrastructure, elastic scaling and a rich ecosystem of managed services that reduce operational overhead.
When the two are combined, teams can:
- Provision and tear down environments programmatically, eliminating the bottlenecks that slow release cycles in traditional on-premises setups.
- Integrate cloud-native CI/CD services with DevOps toolchains, reducing manual handoffs between build, test and deploy stages.
- Scale test environments on demand, making it practical to run comprehensive automated test suites without dedicated hardware.
- Shift cost from capital expenditure to variable operational expenditure, aligning infrastructure spend directly with delivery activity.
Ayman Sayed, then president and chief product officer at CA Technologies, summarised the business case: “Today, being built to succeed means being built to change. Working around the world with customers of all sizes, this change manifests in the move to public cloud workloads for greater flexibility, agility and cost efficiency. Now the data proves the benefits and value of the approach.”
What This Means for DevOps Teams in Practice
The study’s findings reinforce a broader industry trend: adopting DevOps practices without also modernising the underlying infrastructure platform leaves significant performance gains on the table. Equally, migrating workloads to the cloud without also investing in DevOps culture, automation and continuous delivery disciplines tends to reproduce old problems in a new environment.
Organisations looking to move from “slow mover” to “delivery disruptor” status typically need to address both dimensions in parallel:
- Establish DevOps fundamentals — version control, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, cross-functional team structures and a blameless incident culture.
- Leverage cloud capabilities deliberately — use managed services, infrastructure-as-code and cloud-native deployment patterns rather than simply lifting and shifting existing workloads.
- Measure what matters — track deployment frequency, lead time for changes, mean time to recovery and change failure rate (the DORA metrics) to validate improvement over time.
Context and Caveats
This research was published in 2017 and was commissioned by CA Technologies, a vendor with commercial interests in both DevOps tooling and cloud management products. The percentage improvements cited are self-reported by survey respondents rather than independently measured benchmarks. Nonetheless, the directional finding — that combined adoption outperforms either approach in isolation — is consistent with subsequent industry research, including the annual DORA State of DevOps reports.
Teams evaluating their own DevOps and cloud strategies should treat these figures as indicative rather than precise targets, and validate outcomes against their own baseline metrics.