This article is based on analysis originally published via forbes.com, drawing on survey data and practitioner interviews conducted through 2017. The barriers and forecasts discussed reflect conditions reported at that time and remain a useful framework for understanding enterprise DevOps maturity.
Enterprise DevOps: Past Barriers, Lasting Lessons
When analysts began calling a watershed moment the “year of enterprise DevOps,” survey data suggested roughly half of organizations had implemented some form of DevOps practice. Yet having a DevOps initiative underway is very different from having one that is mature, scaled, and delivering measurable business value. The barriers to meaningful adoption were — and in many organizations still are — real and varied.
The ten barriers outlined below were compiled from practitioner conversations spanning organizations at every stage of DevOps maturity, from early explorers to teams already attempting to scale. Understanding these barriers as a ranked list provides a useful diagnostic framework regardless of what year you are reading this.
The 10 DevOps Barriers, Ranked
10. Executive Buy-In
The barrier: Securing support, resource alignment, and budget commitment from senior leadership has historically been one of the first walls DevOps practitioners hit. Without executive sponsorship, DevOps efforts remain isolated, underfunded, and at risk of being deprioritized.
The trend: As IT-related initiatives climbed in priority among CEOs — with technology investment ranked among the top business priorities in Gartner surveys — DevOps initiatives that demonstrably balance agility with risk management gained a clearer path to C-suite support. The key accelerator: proactively educating business stakeholders using business outcomes language, not engineering jargon. Top-down sponsored DevOps programs became increasingly common as the practice matured.
9. Fragmented Toolchain
The barrier: The DevOps ecosystem grew rapidly, producing a sprawl of open-source and commercial tools that often did not integrate cleanly. Teams accumulated overlapping tools for CI, CD, monitoring, and configuration management, creating inconsistency across teams and slowing standardization.
The trend: Toolchain consolidation is a multi-year process. Governance frameworks and platform engineering practices have since helped organizations rationalize their toolsets, but fragmentation remains a real challenge for large enterprises with distributed teams and multiple lines of business.
8. Budget Allocation
The barrier: A common misconception — that DevOps was essentially free because many tools are open source — led to chronic under-budgeting. In practice, enterprise-grade support, skilled engineers, and the cost of non-standardized adoption added up quickly.
The trend: As organizations gained experience, the true cost of DevOps became clearer. Mature programs began budgeting explicitly for tooling support contracts, training, and deliberate experimentation — including the cost of controlled failure. Recognizing that “open source” does not mean “free at enterprise scale” is a prerequisite for realistic planning.
7. Skills Gaps
The barrier: DevOps expertise was scarce and often treated as a floating consultant overlay rather than an embedded organizational capability. Infrastructure and operations professionals needed structured upskilling, but training programs were inconsistent.
The trend: Structured training programs, standardized blueprints, and common toolsets began normalizing DevOps competency development. The emergence of internal DevOps champions — engineers who advocate for and teach practices across teams — proved effective. Specialized roles such as NetOps and ITOps developed focused DevOps literacy tracks. This barrier lowers over time but does not disappear entirely.
6. Application Complexity
The barrier: Legacy monolithic and three-tier applications are difficult to deploy using modern CI/CD pipelines. Application modernization — breaking monoliths into services, migrating to cloud-native architectures — is a prerequisite for many DevOps patterns, yet it is a massive undertaking.
The trend: Application modernization is a decade-long initiative at most large enterprises. DevOps practices themselves accelerate modernization by improving feedback loops and enabling incremental refactoring. Progress is real but necessarily gradual.
5. No Formal DevOps Plan
The barrier: Many early DevOps efforts were grassroots, bottom-up movements disconnected from formal planning processes, measurable objectives, or business goals. Without a plan, DevOps remained a technical experiment rather than a strategic capability.
The trend: As DevOps became mainstream, organizations began attaching it to formal program management structures — with budget, staffing, roadmaps, and KPIs tied to measurable business outcomes. Treating DevOps as a program, not a project, changes its trajectory significantly.
4. Managing Environment Complexity
The barrier: As applications became distributed across multi-cloud environments and accessed from diverse endpoints — including mobile and IoT — replicating and managing consistent environments across development, testing, and production became increasingly difficult.
The trend: Infrastructure-as-code, environment blueprinting, and sandbox automation addressed this directly. Automating the creation and teardown of environment replicas within CI/CD pipelines reduces manual configuration drift, improves governance, and increases both team productivity and release velocity.
3. Legacy Infrastructure (Technical Debt)
The barrier: Brownfield deployments — existing production systems running on on-premises infrastructure with proprietary tools and manual processes — create significant friction for cloud-native DevOps patterns. Physical infrastructure rigidity, long provisioning cycles, and accumulated technical debt all slow adoption.
The trend: Infrastructure automation platforms and as-a-service models provide a bridge. Tools that span both legacy brownfield and modern greenfield environments allow organizations to introduce new workflows without forcing a disruptive “rip and replace” approach. Protecting existing investment while incrementally modernizing is the pragmatic path.
2. Test Automation
The barrier: Organizations often implemented CI/CD pipelines while treating test automation — and security — as afterthoughts. Manual, ad hoc testing becomes a bottleneck as deployment frequency increases, directly undermining the value of a fast pipeline.
The trend: Continuous testing emerged as a recognized, critical component of the CI/CD pipeline rather than a phase that follows development. Automated test environments, sandbox-based testing, and shift-left security practices help break the manual testing bottleneck, improving both quality and release velocity at scale.
1. Culture
The barrier: Consistently rated the number one barrier to DevOps adoption — especially in enterprise environments — culture encompasses the willingness to collaborate across silos, embrace shared responsibility, tolerate controlled risk-taking, and treat failure as a learning opportunity rather than a punishable event. “Business as usual” attitudes actively undermine DevOps transformation.
The trend: Culture change does not happen by accident. Enterprises that succeed treat cultural transformation as an explicit program deliverable, not a byproduct of deploying tools. Executive sponsorship, the deliberate selection and empowerment of DevOps champions, and collaborative toolsets together create the conditions for a sustainable shift — both top-down and bottom-up — that breaks functional silos and builds genuine shared ownership.
The Bigger Picture: DevOps as a Continuous Practice
Taken together, these ten barriers paint a picture of an organizational transformation that is neither quick nor simple. DevOps is not an on/off switch. It is a set of recursive learnings — each improvement informing the next — applied iteratively as an organization discovers the right mix of culture, process, and tooling for its specific context.
Several important implications follow from this framework:
- No two organizations share the same barrier profile. Size, industry, existing infrastructure, and organizational culture all shape which barriers are most acute.
- Tool adoption without cultural change yields limited results. The top-ranked barrier — culture — enables or constrains progress on every other barrier below it.
- Budget realism matters from the start. Underestimating the true cost of DevOps (tooling, talent, training, experimentation) sets programs up for failure.
- Expectation management prevents disillusionment. DevOps adoption follows a maturity curve. Overpromising early outcomes creates backlash that can derail programs before they deliver value.
Understanding these barriers — and the trends that reduce them — remains as relevant for organizations planning DevOps investments today as it was when this analysis was first published. The specifics of tooling evolve; the organizational and cultural dynamics change more slowly.