This article is based on findings from a global survey of 400 IT executives and practitioners conducted by Longitude (an arm of Financial Times Group) on behalf of New Relic. The original reporting appeared on devops.com.
The Growing Divide Between DevOps Haves and Have-Nots
Organizations that have fully embraced DevOps best practices are beginning to see measurable financial and operational advantages over competitors that have not made comparable investments. That is the central finding of a global survey of 400 IT executives and practitioners, commissioned by New Relic and conducted by Longitude, a research unit of the Financial Times Group.
The survey segments respondents into leaders and laggards based on their application development maturity. The data suggests the gap between these two groups is widening — and that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the divergence.
Who Are the DevOps Leaders?
The survey identifies 25% of respondents as DevOps leaders — organizations that treat software quality and delivery speed as strategic priorities rather than operational concerns. Key characteristics of this group include:
- 90% identify the development and deployment of higher-quality software as a strategic business priority.
- 98% have adopted continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines.
- 94% have made observability a core part of their software development process.
- 96% have adopted a cloud-native approach to application development, with leaders running an average of 66% of their software and systems in the cloud.
Tangible Business Outcomes for Leaders
Adopting these practices is not just a technical improvement — it correlates with measurable business results. Over a third of DevOps leaders (more than 33%) report that their organizations have seen revenue increase by 10% or more over the preceding three years, a figure they attribute at least in part to their software delivery capabilities.
Operational Efficiency: Innovation Over Fire-Fighting
One of the starkest contrasts between leaders and laggards is how developer time is spent. Among leaders, an average of 77% of developer time is dedicated to innovation rather than fixing defects, incidents, or technical debt.
This is enabled in large part by a proactive approach to system reliability:
- 78% of leaders discover system and software interruptions through observability platforms before end users report them.
- 99% of leaders say they can quickly understand the impact of changes made to software.
- 83% of leaders experience fewer than five major software or system outages per month.
- 75% of leaders achieve an average incident resolution time of under 30 minutes.
Advanced Practices: Chaos Testing and Automated Remediation
DevOps leaders are not just adopting mainstream practices — they are pushing further into advanced reliability engineering. The survey finds that among leaders:
- 77% have adopted chaos testing — deliberately injecting failures into systems to validate resilience.
- 89% have implemented automated remediation, reducing the need for manual intervention when issues occur.
These practices directly support the short resolution times and low outage rates reported above, and represent a level of maturity that most laggard organizations have not yet reached.
Cloud Adoption: High, But Not Without Friction
Even among leaders, cloud adoption is not frictionless. The survey identifies security concerns and regulatory compliance as the top barriers to greater cloud adoption — consistent with what practitioners typically encounter when migrating regulated workloads or operating in highly scrutinized industries.
Organizational Structure: Smaller Teams, Broader Tooling
Buddy Brewer, then Global VP and General Manager for Digital Experience Monitoring at New Relic, noted in commentary accompanying the survey that organizations are increasingly focusing their DevOps investments on applications that are most critical to the business — particularly digital engagement tools that became essential during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He also observed that IT organizations are restructuring into smaller, cross-functional teams to improve collaboration during build and deployment cycles. As team structures flatten and distribute, those teams require access to a broad portfolio of cloud-based tools to manage complex, highly distributed applications effectively.
The Widening Gap — and the Pandemic Effect
The survey paints a clear picture: as DevOps leaders advance further along the maturity curve, the gap between them and laggards grows wider, not narrower. The pandemic accelerated this dynamic. Organizations that already had mature DevOps processes were better positioned to adapt quickly to remote work, shifting customer demands, and digital-first service delivery. Many doubled down on their DevOps investments as a direct response.
For laggards, the calculus is difficult. Budget constraints during an economic downturn make it harder to invest in modernizing tools and processes — but continued reliance on outdated approaches risks making recovery even more difficult once conditions improve. Organizations that delay DevOps transformation may find the gap has become structurally harder to close.
Key Takeaways for DevOps Practitioners
- CI/CD and observability are table stakes for DevOps leaders — near-universal adoption among the top quartile suggests these are no longer differentiators but baseline expectations.
- Proactive incident detection via observability platforms — rather than waiting for user complaints — is a defining trait of high-performing teams.
- Chaos engineering and automated remediation are the practices that separate mature organizations from intermediate ones.
- Developer time allocation matters: organizations that protect innovation time by minimizing reactive work see compounding returns in delivery speed and product quality.
- Security and compliance remain real constraints even for cloud-native leaders and should be treated as first-class architecture concerns, not afterthoughts.
Source: Original survey findings reported via devops.com, based on research by Longitude on behalf of New Relic (published 2020).