This article is based on survey findings announced by F5 Networks (NASDAQ: FFIV) via Business Wire in August 2017. Original source: businesswire.com.
Overview
F5 Networks released the results of a survey comparing the views of more than 850 NetOps and DevOps IT professionals on their disciplines, collaboration practices, and attitudes toward automation and multi-cloud deployments. The conventional wisdom has long painted NetOps and DevOps as adversarial groups with incompatible goals. The survey data tells a more nuanced story: the two groups share more common ground than the “us vs. them” narrative suggests, but specific friction points around pipeline access and skill gaps are quietly driving the fragmentation of infrastructure across multiple cloud providers.
Key Survey Findings
Mutual Respect for Each Other’s Priorities
More than three-quarters of respondents in both groups said they believe the other function is prioritizing the right things within IT. This level of cross-functional respect is significant: it signals a shared understanding of broader organisational goals and a foundation for deeper collaboration. Deployment frequency was also a point of agreement, with 70% of DevOps and 74% of NetOps respondents indicating satisfaction with the pace at which applications and services are being delivered.
Shared Support for Automation
Both groups rated pipeline automation as important, though with slightly different levels of enthusiasm. On a 5-point scale, DevOps respondents gave automation an average significance rating of 4.0, while NetOps rated it 3.5. Critically, both groups reported higher confidence in application reliability, performance, and security when the production pipeline was more than 50% automated. This is a meaningful data point: it suggests that increasing automation is not just a DevOps preference but a broadly held belief about how to build more dependable systems.
Friction Over Pipeline Access
The clearest point of divergence concerns how much access DevOps should have to production resources. Forty-five percent of DevOps respondents believe they should have access to at least 75% of the production pipeline. Only 31% of NetOps respondents agreed with granting DevOps that level of access. This 14-point gap reflects a structural tension: DevOps teams need broad access to move fast, while NetOps teams carry responsibility for security, availability, and performance — and are therefore more cautious about permissions.
Left unresolved, this misalignment creates organisational drag. Processes that should be streamlined stall, and application delivery timelines slip — directly impacting business outcomes in an environment that increasingly depends on rapid digital delivery.
Pipeline Access Gaps Are Fuelling Multi-Cloud Sprawl
The access friction has a concrete downstream effect: it is pushing DevOps teams toward cloud solutions outside the traditional IT stack. Sixty-five percent of DevOps respondents said they are influenced “a lot” or “some” toward adopting cloud solutions by the level of automation and self-service access available in the pipeline. On the NetOps side, 44% said DevOps’ use of external cloud technologies affects their willingness to grant pipeline access “some,” with an additional 21% saying it affects them “a lot.”
The result is a self-reinforcing cycle: limited pipeline access leads DevOps to adopt cloud-based workarounds, which increases NetOps’ caution about permissions, which further limits access and drives even more cloud adoption. The end state is a multi-cloud environment that evolves organically rather than by design — making application delivery, scaling, and security progressively harder to manage.
Bridging NetOps and DevOps: What the Data Suggests
The survey results collectively point to automation and self-service capabilities as the most productive area of shared investment. Both teams want more of it; both teams report better outcomes when it is in place. The challenge is agreeing on the governance model that determines who controls what — and to what extent.
Skill gaps compound the problem. DevOps respondents rated their own skills at 3.6 out of 5 in terms of meeting their job function requirements. NetOps rated themselves slightly lower at 3.4. Neither score is alarming in isolation, but in the context of rapid cloud adoption and increasing infrastructure complexity, confidence gaps on both sides can slow the adoption of the very automation tools that would benefit everyone.
Practical Implications for Engineering Teams
- Define pipeline access policies jointly. The data shows that NetOps and DevOps disagree on access levels — but both groups respect each other. This is the right environment for a structured conversation about role-based access controls (RBAC) and clear ownership boundaries within CI/CD and production pipelines.
- Treat automation as a shared goal, not a DevOps project. NetOps teams that score automation at 3.5 out of 5 are not opposed to it. Framing automation initiatives as cross-functional efforts — with NetOps involved in design and governance — is more likely to build consensus than presenting them as developer-led mandates.
- Address multi-cloud sprawl proactively. Unplanned multi-cloud adoption driven by access limitations is harder to secure and govern than planned multi-cloud architectures. Teams should assess whether current access friction is a root cause of cloud sprawl before adding more cloud providers.
- Invest in cross-functional training. Skill gaps in both groups are real. Certification programs, shared labs, and cross-team training reduce the knowledge silos that reinforce the NetOps/DevOps divide.
- Establish shared KPIs. Deployment frequency, application reliability, and security incident rates are metrics both teams care about. Shared dashboards and shared accountability help align incentives.
Context: Why This Still Matters
Although this survey was conducted in 2017, the underlying tensions it identifies have not disappeared. If anything, the proliferation of Kubernetes, service meshes, cloud-native networking, and platform engineering has made the NetOps/DevOps boundary more complex, not less. The debate over who owns the network layer in a containerised, multi-cloud environment is an active one in most large engineering organisations. The finding that both groups broadly support collaboration — but diverge on access — remains a useful diagnostic frame for teams trying to understand why their DevOps transformation is stalling.
Source
Survey data and executive commentary sourced from an F5 Networks press release published via Business Wire, August 2017. The full companion report with methodology details was referenced in the original announcement but is not linked here.