This guide walks you through the critical steps to build a persuasive DevOps business case that resonates with both technical leaders and executive decision-makers.

1. Understand the Business Drivers

Before drafting a business case, identify why your organization needs DevOps. Common business drivers include:

• Faster Time-to-Market: Delivering features, products, or updates ahead of competitors.
• Customer Experience: Improving reliability, availability, and responsiveness.
• Cost Efficiency: Reducing manual processes, infrastructure waste, and downtime costs.
• Regulatory Compliance & Security: Building governance, observability, and security into pipelines (DevSecOps).
• Scalability & Innovation: Enabling faster experimentation without risking stability.

👉 Frame DevOps as a business enabler, not just a technical upgrade.

2. Define the Current State (Baseline)

Executives approve transformation when they see where we are vs. where we need to go. Gather baseline data across:

• Deployment frequency (e.g., once every 2 weeks vs. daily).
• Lead time for changes (idea → production).
• Change failure rate (percentage of releases causing incidents).
• Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) after failures.
• Operational cost of downtime or manual intervention.

This quantifies the cost of “status quo” and sets the stage for improvement.

3. Translate DevOps Benefits into Business Outcomes

The heart of your business case lies in mapping DevOps capabilities to financial and strategic outcomes:

👉 Always express outcomes in terms of revenue growth, cost savings, or risk reduction.

4. Identify Stakeholders & Align Incentives

Your business case must appeal to multiple roles:

• CFO / Finance → ROI, cost optimization, reduced downtime losses.
• CTO / CIO → Innovation velocity, cloud scalability, modernization.
• Operations Teams → Less firefighting, more stability.
• Product Owners / Marketing → Faster features, better customer satisfaction.

Tailor messaging for each group—executives want numbers, engineers want efficiency, and product teams want speed-to-market.

5. Quantify Costs and Investments

Every strong business case needs clarity on what it takes to implement DevOps:

• People → Training, hiring DevOps/SRE engineers, cultural change workshops.
• Tools → CI/CD platforms (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, ArgoCD, Tekton), observability tools (Prometheus, Datadog, Grafana).
• Cloud/Infrastructure → Kubernetes clusters, cloud-native adoption, IaC pipelines.
• Consulting/Partnerships → Accelerators, coaching, or external expertise.

Frame this as a strategic investment rather than just “IT spending.”

6. Show ROI and Payback Period

Executives care about return on investment. Use a mix of quantitative and qualitative ROI:

Quantitative ROI Example:

• Current downtime costs $20,000/month.
• Automated pipelines and monitoring reduce downtime by 70%.
• Savings = ~$14,000/month → ~$168,000/year.

Qualitative ROI Example:

• Improved developer experience → higher retention.
• Faster releases → competitive advantage in customer acquisition.

👉 Highlight a payback period (e.g., 12–18 months) to make adoption realistic.

7. Address Risks and Mitigation

Stakeholders will ask: What could go wrong?

• Cultural resistance → Mitigation: Training, leadership sponsorship.
• Initial slowdowns → Mitigation: Start small with pilot teams.
• Tool sprawl → Mitigation: Governance and tool selection framework.
• Security concerns → Mitigation: Integrate DevSecOps from Day 1.

Showing you’ve thought about risks builds credibility.

8. Start with a Pilot, Then Scale

Propose a phased adoption model:

1. Pilot Project → Apply DevOps in 1–2 teams. Measure KPIs (lead time, deployment frequency, failure rate).
2. Evaluate ROI → Share early wins with stakeholders.
3. Scale Organization-wide → Extend to all teams with refined playbooks.

This reduces fear of disruption and proves value incrementally.

9. Present the Business Case

When presenting, keep it executive-friendly:

• Executive Summary: 1–2 pages max.
• Problem → Solution → ROI Storyline.
• Visuals: Charts showing before/after KPIs, ROI graphs, DevOps metrics dashboard mockups.
• Call to Action: Recommend pilot project approval with timeline & budget.

10. Example Business Case (Mini-Scenario)

Our current release cycle is 2 weeks with a 20% failure rate, costing $200k annually in downtime. With CI/CD automation, IaC, and monitoring, we project release cycles reduced to 2 days, failure rates cut to <5%, and downtime costs lowered by 70%. Required investment is $150k (training, tools, cloud), with a projected payback in under 12 months. Beyond cost savings, DevOps positions us for faster product delivery, improved customer satisfaction, and reduced compliance risk.

✅ Conclusion

Building a DevOps business case is about translating engineering excellence into executive language. By linking DevOps to revenue growth, cost reduction, risk management, and competitive advantage, you shift the conversation from “Why DevOps?” to “When can we start?”.

The term Cloud Computing stands for data centres available to several users over the Internet. A few years ago, IT organizations were sceptical regarding utilizing cloud computing technology as part of their IT strategy. However, there is no doubt in their minds today as they are devising strategies to leverage it as per their business requirements.

Adopting cloud computing technology can significantly influence business growth by reducing expenditure on resources and making processes more efficient. For a better understanding of this concept, here are the significant advantages of cloud computing technology:

Cloud hosting saves money
Adopting new technology is often expensive but this is where cloud computing technology shines. Since everything is hosted on the service provider’s server, one doesn’t need to invest in any kind of hardware or data centre. It can save the money that would otherwise have been spent on maintenance.

Built-in scalability
In one’s own data centre, to increase computing capacity, one needs to buy, install and configure a new server. While that may seem well and good, two scenarios require consideration. Firstly, if the increased capacity is required only for a limited time, the amount of money invested in those resources will pretty much go to waste. Secondly, if the demand comes unexpectedly, will it be possible to get the server up and running in time?

With cloud computing, such scenarios don’t arise because scalability comes built-in. If a sudden surge in traffic is experienced and demands extra resources, one can instantly increase the computing capacity. Scaling down after the traffic subsides can also be achieved with ease. Cloud provides increased agility and cost-effective resourcing which is essential for business growth.

Advantage over competitors
Since almost no time is wasted for the applications to go online, it gives a massive strategic advantage over one’s competitors who haven’t adopted cloud computing technology yet.

No downtime
Since businesses are dependent on applications for running crucial operations, downtime can cause serious losses. If the server fails, the entire business might come to a screeching halt, and getting back online can often be a tedious process.

However, with cloud computing, there are almost zero risks of facing downtime. Since the clients are hosted on virtual machines, they can be transferred from one place to another within the clustered server quickly. The cloud’s hyper-converged design protects businesses from all sorts of malfunctions including hard disk and server failure.

Faster performance
Cloud computing offers high-performance servers with state-of-the-art technologies including powerful CPUs and super-fast SSD drives. Also, clients’ requests are routed in a way that maximizes speed and capacity utilization. If one server experiences a heavy load, it can be easily transferred to other servers in the cluster. It ensures that no server suffers from performance issues.

New apps can run quicker than before
Getting new applications to run smoothly was a herculean task before cloud computing. Cloud-based applications, however, have significantly reduced the time required for successful execution. Since a large number of cloud-based applications can be used instantly after signup, one can start leveraging the power of AI and ML applications as soon as they migrate to the cloud.

Better security
An organization’s data is safer on the cloud than on the servers. Cloud service providers have to comply with several strict security regulations to safeguard their clients’ data. They do so by utilizing robust firewall technologies loaded with intrusion prevention systems and in-flow virus protection. They are adept at identifying and isolating threats before they can reach your server.

Brings flexibility to the table
Cloud computing brings a great deal of flexibility to the table. Since it is internet-based, the employees can access files from anywhere, which enables remote working. Businesses that migrated to the cloud had a relatively easier time switching to the remote working model during the pandemic. Also, by enabling remote working, cloud computing offers the option to reduce infrastructural expenses.

Cloud computing technology provides several benefits to businesses. It’s affordable, flexible, capable of saving time and money, secure, and highly efficient. All in all, cloud computing contributes significantly to growth.

Microsoft is to acquire artificial intelligence and cloud computing company Nuance for $19.7 billion (roughly Rs. 1,47,900 crores), bolstering its healthcare presence with a leader in voice recognition technology.

Nuance’s technology includes a conversational AI tool versed in specialised medical terms, freeing physicians from note-taking, and allowing better patient-physician interactions in person or in the telemedicine appointments that have taken off during the pandemic, executives said.

Nuance’s programme “has completely redefined clinical documentation by capturing and contextualising every words of the physician/patient encounter and automatically documenting it,” said Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella during a briefing Monday.

Nuance’s technology is used extensively in medical records and is currently employed in more than three-quarters of US hospitals, Microsoft said in a news release. The transaction is all-cash and the sum includes Nuance’s net debt.

Nuance’s technology is currently used by more than 55 percent of physicians and 75 percent of radiologists in the United States. Microsoft said the deal would double its potential healthcare market to nearly $500 billion (roughly Rs. 37,53,880 crores).

This acquisition builds on the existing partnership between the two companies, which have been collaborating since 2019 in telemedicine, a sector whose growth has been spurred exponentially by COVID-19 lockdowns around the world.

Last year, the Redmond, Washington-based giant integrated Nuance Communication’s Dragon Ambient eXperience programme into its Teams communications software, which enables remote transcription of medical conversations.”

Microsoft also sees potential to expand the technology beyond health care. For example, the similar AI transcriptions could be employed by financial advisors, said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president for Microsoft’s cloud and AI group.

“Nearly any professional service could benefit from real-time engagement converted into material intelligence that drives actions,” Guthrie said during an investor presentation.

“Every customer I talk to is looking to make the right decision at the right time for all of their stakeholders.”

‘No brainer’
The deal comes on the heels of Microsoft’s 2016 purchase of LinkedIn for $27 billion (roughly Rs. 2,02,620 crores) and represents “the latest step in Microsoft’s industry-specific cloud strategy,” the company said.

Like other technology heavyweights, Microsoft has been a big beneficiary of the economic dislocations during COVID-19.

The company’s earnings jumped by 33 percent in the latest quarter to $15.5 billion (roughly Rs. 1,16,320 crores) and included a boost from cloud computing and personal computing, including its Xbox video games.

Wedbush analyst Daniel Ives called the Nuance tie-up a “trophy” deal for the company founded by Bill Gates, which is on a “strategic offensive” in search of targets to buy.

“For Nadella & Co, this is the right acquisition at the right time with Microsoft doubling down on its healthcare initiatives over the coming years,” he said in an analysis. “The Nuance deal is a strategic no brainer in our opinion for MSFT and fits like a glove into its healthcare endeavors.”

Based in Burlington, near Boston, Nuance was founded in 1992 and specialises in conversational artificial intelligence solutions, particularly in the healthcare sector.

Nuance Communications, which employed more than 7,100 people as of September 30, reported sales of $1.48 billion (roughly Rs. 11,110 crores) last year.

Ives said Microsoft is on the hunt for more acquisitions and this deal “could be the first step in an increased appetite for deals in 2021 with Discord (video game chat community) another potential trophy for Redmond.”

It comes just a few months after the takeover of ZeniMax, the parent company of video game publisher Bethesda Softworks, for $7.5 billion (roughly Rs. 56,300 crores) in September.

Media reports cite the potential for other big deals, including crafting platform Pinterest in a possible $51 billion (roughly Rs. 3,82,840 crores) transaction, and the popular Discord discussion platform for about $10 billion (roughly Rs. 75,070 crores).

A global survey of 1,350 business and IT executives conducted by Jigsaw Research on behalf of NTT Ltd., a provider of IT services, suggests organizations are a lot more agile in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s still a significant gap in terms of prioritizing agility.

A full 89% of business and IT leaders agree COVID-19 has caused significant changes to their operating processes, with 87% also agreeing it has accelerated their digital transformation strategy. A third of respondents (33%) also noted they pivoted their technology focus to take advantage of a market opportunity or scale their operations.

However, well over a third of operational executives identified speed and agility as a core component of technology strategy, while only just over half of IT executives agreed (53%).

Overall, the survey found there is a consensus IT remains a key enabler of business efficiency. A total of 91.4% respondents agreed that enabling business efficiency is a key driver for their technology strategy, with 92% of IT respondents saying their overall technology strategy is aligned either fully or partially with the organization’s business strategy needs.

However, there’s a significant divide in terms of the importance of IT’s role in driving business efficiency. A technology strategy that drives business efficiency opportunities is seen as being most crucial by 70% of operations teams, yet only 48% of IT teams said the same.

Sanjay Lakhani, a principal consultant for NTT and head of the IT service management (ITSM) practice for the Americas region said that while the alignment between business operations and IT is not as close as it could be, a lot of improvement has been made. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the divide between IT and the rest of the business was generally wider, noted Lakhani.

Now that more organizations are realizing how dependent they are on software, there’s a lot more focus on application development with business units, he added. There’s also more pressure on IT operations teams, which are being asked to keep pace with the rate at which digital business transformation initiatives have accelerated, added Lakhani.

Unfortunately, the survey also highlighted an emerging technology gap. The survey found 92% of business and IT leaders agreed emerging technology is crucial for their technology strategy, but only two-fifths (41%) believed they have the technology to meet their organization’s immediate objectives. Those result suggest a significant transition is underway, both in terms of how software is constructed and the type of IT infrastructure required.

In the meantime, it remains to be seen to what degree the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered the DNA of IT operations teams, but it’s apparent enterprise IT will never be the same. Most IT teams have embraced, to varying degrees, agile application development methodologies along with DevOps best practices. The challenge now is aligning the operational cadence IT teams follow with that of the rest of the business in the wake of the pandemic.

Like so many other innovators across the globe, forward-thinking organisations in the Asia-Pacific region are reinventing themselves with a goal to fuel renewed digital business growth. As economic activities return to pre-COVID pandemic levels, these savvy leaders are building technology-enabled business models.

Cloud computing has emerged as the core foundation of this renewed business technology focus, leading to Asia-Pacific public cloud services spending growth of over 38 percent to $36.4 billion in 2020, according to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC).

“Cloud services have addressed more than cost management challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Cloud services and technologies have been the basis for the rapid introduction of new digital services to support remote workers and online customers, and it’s been the speed of implementation and low up-front costs that have enabled that,” said Chris Morris, vice president at IDC.

Cloud computing market development
Cloud Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) has been the top contributor to the overall public cloud spend during 2020, making up around 48 percent of the overall cloud investment — and it is expected to remain the highest throughout the forecast period of 2021-2024.

IaaS spending across compute, storage, and networking will remain steady throughout the forecast with compute taking the major share of spending followed by storage. Software as a Service (SaaS) is positioned as the second largest in terms of spending on cloud computing with a share of around 40 percent, followed by Platform as a service (PaaS) with an 11 percent share in 2020. The majority share of SaaS spending is coming from enterprises spending on cloud-hosted applications. Software Applications and System Infrastructure Software (SIS) is also contributing to SaaS spending.

This is expected to further grow as enterprises leverage SaaS solutions that cover collaboration, productivity, and IT security to support ‘remote working’ and the ‘hybrid workforce’ phenomena. PaaS spending will be led by Data Management Software, which will record a five-year CAGR of 41.2 percent during 2019-2024.

IDC expects this trend to continue due to the focus on business scalability, increased performance, improved security, and optimising IT operations to create business resiliency and cap on-premises infrastructure costs. Moreover, cloud-based security benefits are driving enterprises in the region to migrate to public cloud service offerings with new enthusiasm.

Regarding industry growth projections, Professional Services (15 percent share), Banking and Discrete Manufacturing (around 10 percent share) are the top three industries accounting for one-third of the overall public cloud services spending throughout the forecast period of 2021-24.

However, Construction and Professional Services — due to increased focus on external-facing interactions and customer experience — will see the fastest growth in public cloud spending with a five-year CAGR of 39 percent and 35 percent respectively. Regarding commercial segment growth, very large businesses will account for 37.1 percent, medium-sized businesses will deliver around 30.2 percent, and large businesses with 20.8 percent are the three segments that accounted for the Asia-Pacific total 2020 public cloud spending.

Both small and medium-size businesses show the fastest growth during the forecast period of around 34 percent in cloud investment. These segments were the hardest hit organisations during the global pandemic, and have an immediate need for business continuity, resiliency, and eventually new digital growth.

Outlook for public cloud services adoption
From a geographical perspective, China was the largest market for public cloud services in 2020 with its $19.4 billion investment that accounted for about 53.4 percent of the Asia-Pacific total. The openness of enterprises to adopt cloud technology, supplemented by government initiatives and the presence of home-grown cloud service providers, is boosting the continued adoption and growth.

Australia ($5.2 billion) and India ($3.5 billion) will be in second and third place respectively in terms of cloud infrastructure and service spending in the region, driven by fast adoption across enterprises and the presence of global hyperscale public cloud providers.

That said, I anticipate that cloud computing trends in this region will be reflected in other regions as a post-pandemic economic recovery emerges, and the thriving organisations accelerate their digital transformation agenda. Therefore, forward-thinking CIOs and CTOs will have a unique opportunity to further influence digital business growth strategies.

The impact of public cloud on retail banking is already clear. As a mainstream technology, cloud enables top initiatives such as digital, mobile, and customer analytics. In the corporate banking segment, the pace of cloud adoption and migration has been slower. Top among the forces impeding legacy transformation and the move to the cloud: security and compliance concerns.

Today, corporate banking’s approach to innovative technologies and cloud computing is changing. While on-premises may remain the preferred location for many applications in the near term, the business case for evaluating and making the move to cloud is increasingly clear. Corporate banks are looking to the cloud for agility, innovation, ways to free up budget and move away from capital expenditures, and to keep pace with clients’ expectations for digital engagement.

Findings from Celent’s inaugural Corporate Banking Public Cloud Survey highlight banks’ ambitions and strategies for public cloud adoption for their critical corporate and transaction banking solutions. The results reveal the changing approach that corporate banks are taking toward cloud—and the trends that are likely to continue.

Driving corporate banks’ cloud migrations
Though earlier discussions about the move to the cloud may have been anchored in the possibility of cost savings, many drivers are behind the current interest. Business benefits are clear for both the IT and business divisions of a financial institution (FI). The top drivers are increased agility, which aids in the acceleration of development and innovation, and the ability to spend a greater percentage of the IT budget on innovation.

Additional drivers (each cited by 50% of respondents) include the flexibility provided by moving away from CapEx to OpEx; improved customer experience; improved compliance, compared to in-house managed systems; and an improved ability to partner with the fintech ecosystem. Over the past year, COVID-19 provided an additional impetus, emphasizing the need to enhance client engagement and the overall customer experience; half of survey respondents indicate plans to move more workloads into public cloud infrastructure in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Moving beyond barriers
Two well-known concerns—security and compliance—were cited by many respondents (63% each) as practical barriers to implementing cloud initiatives. Yet perceptions around security are encouraging: 90% disagreed with the statement that “cloud technologies are not secure enough for bank workloads” and half believe that cloud can contribute to improved cybersecurity.

Other concerns, perhaps discussed less commonly, are also seen as practical barriers to implementing effective public cloud migration initiatives. These include the lack of internal expertise, lack of internal alignment on the

best path forward (caused by risk issues, operational impacts, and changing roles, including within the IT department), and technology infrastructure that’s not yet cloud-ready.

To evaluate how to move forward appropriately, collaborative decisions provide significant value. Clearly, caution is justified when making decisions about technology architecture—particularly when client-facing apps and sensitive financial details are involved. IT groups frequently initiate discussions about enterprise architecture strategy, but plans are often made collaboratively, with input from enterprise architects, line of business (LoB) technology teams, and LoB product managers. At some FIs, however, decisions are left to the CTO/CIO or the IT group.

State of the strategy
Corporate banks tend to be conservative about their approach to public cloud migration. Only 20% (compared to 40% of retail banks) will embark on a broad migration to the cloud. Instead, in corporate banking, non-client facing systems will migrate to the cloud selectively, as reported by 70%; core transaction platforms and customer data will remain on-premise (running in the FI’s data center). Though these systems may remain on-prem in the near term, most banks are (or will be) operating in hybrid multi-cloud deployment environments, using a mix of on-premise, private cloud (infrastructure provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization, comprising multiple consumers or business units) and public cloud (on-demand delivery of compute power, database storage, applications, and other IT resources via the internet with pay-as-you-go pricing) services, with orchestration across platforms.

As all banks anticipate that their architecture will evolve, three out of five respondents feel that their enterprise-wide cloud strategy is articulated clearly. A minority, one in five, report that each line of business is pursuing a cloud strategy independently. Most corporate banks (80%) are working with vendor partners to support their cloud plans. Nearly 90% are using a third-party firm to assist with strategy implementation or ongoing cloud management. Banks often select an IT services firm that already knows the FI’s on-prem technology architecture and software solutions; this specialist knowledge can prove advantageous when helping a bank migrate its solutions to the cloud.

Among the top technologies that data-driven banks are embracing (currently running in or planning to migrate to a public cloud within the coming two years) are:

artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML), reported by 50%,
data lake/data warehouse technologies, reported by 50%, and
robotic process automation (RPA), reported by 40%.
At present, API management platforms and blockchain/distributed ledger technology (DLT) remain on corporate banks’ current infrastructures.

When corporate banks focus on core or critical services (e.g., payments and cash management), a cloud-native/cloud-ready strategy for new software procurement is prevalent, as reported by 60%. Others are agnostic regarding the software deployment method.

Migration considerations
Corporate banks that are evaluating their cloud migration plans should keep three main considerations in mind:

1. The application: Evaluate which applications are most appropriate for your selected cloud environment and architecture.

2. The use case: Determine which use cases are most pressing and best suited to the FI’s cloud migration.

3. The current state: Create cloud strategies for elements of the IT stack that are likely to be successful. These can provide experience to support the more complicated migration initiatives, such as applications that may prove more challenging to get to a cloud-enabled state.

The trend toward cloud is clear for corporate banks. The move will happen stepwise. And when it does, banks will be able to tap into the innovation and agility provided by hybrid, multi-cloud environments.

Businesses are at a pivotal moment in time. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that global GDP shrank by 4.4% in 2020, and contraction in the most advanced economies is estimated to be 5.8%. Today, however, vaccine availability and distribution brings us the brightest glimmer of hope yet that slowing the devastation of the virus may be a reality. More effectively addressing the health crisis also means economic recovery is becoming a stronger possibility – if businesses can lean into change and embrace new ways of working.

To enable this recovery, organisations across every industry are accelerating their shift to digital solutions. Turning to cloud technology promises to solve their most challenging problems and enable opportunities amidst changing customer demands and regulatory frameworks. In fact, McKinsey estimates the pandemic has fueled a three- to four-year acceleration of companies adopting digital technologies to support their customer and supply chain interactions. The most innovative companies need to rethink how employees collaborate and how they can digitise customer experiences.

Here are three key ways in which companies can use technology to their advantage and fuel their own recovery.

Businesses need to lower their costs and replatform for the future
Macroeconomic and geopolitical uncertainties create unknowns for every business. As a result, CEOs and CFOs are naturally seeking to optimise areas of their organisations.

Buying, maintaining and upgrading the technology infrastructure needed to run a business is not only difficult, but increasingly it is prohibitively expensive. Fixed IT systems require users to accurately predict their future needs, which now seem out-of-touch with our ever-changing business landscape. By contrast, a cloud server ensures that you only invest in the right amount, enabling users to flexibly adjust their consumption to meet fluctuating demands. This allows businesses to reinvest the remaining capital in creating customer experiences that will drive value creation. Gartner estimates that infrastructure-as-a-service is expected to grow 27.6% in 2021, precisely because of these cost savings and operational efficiencies – two of the greatest benefits of moving to the cloud.

Additionally, companies are realising the potential of a multicloud strategy. This set-up allows businesses to achieve an open, secure and agile infrastructure that can run in any environment, on any cloud. To grow and innovate within a company may mean moving entire on-premise IT infrastructure to the cloud, to transform digital operations.

Every business needs a digital front door
The remote nature of our lives—which is a permanent shift—is compelling businesses to use data and analytics to understand their customers better, overall enriching the customer experience.

Lockdowns have accelerated customer preferences for digital alternatives. Face-to-face customer service – a physical front door- is no longer enough to sustain a growing business. Today, customers also demand a ‘digital entrance’, and it’s transcending virtually every industry. In retail, companies are using AI and machine learning to deliver a better, more accurate online experience. Healthcare providers need secure, scalable platforms that support digital patient visits known as telemedicine.

Digital front doors are also changing the way governments work, like leveraging the cloud to distribute unemployment insurance online. With digitisation comes the opportunity for businesses to use data and analytics to make smarter decisions and get closer to their customers by creating more useful and productive experiences. By investing in innovative digital front doors now, companies will remain agile throughout the pandemic, whilst pivoting with changing customer expectations. Companies should celebrate the ease of digital experiences, which are personalisable and in no way mean a sacrifice on quality.

Companies need to embrace new ways of working
The future of work—and, for that matter, the definition of “workplace” itself—has transformed. While the pandemic as we know it will one day subside, our new way of working is here to stay, and it’s heightened the need to rethink how people get things done. We see the need for a new hybrid work environment, where companies and employees can use a digital workspace that allows them to collaborate on a flexible, cloud-native platform to generate new ideas and connect with each other. A successful transition into this new era of work is contingent on how successfully companies keep their people engaged, productive, and connected while reevaluating existing communication and collaboration tools.

No one can predict what the coming years will bring, but companies can control how they respond to uncertainty by investing in agile infrastructure that keeps people and connection at the heart of their operations. At this inflection point in the story of work, the ways in which each company responds to the challenges and opportunities it brings will define their relevance in the future. Those who lean into change, no matter how uncomfortable, and embrace the opportunity to fundamentally transform, will be stronger than before.

The latest report on the global Continuous Delivery market by In4Research provides a detailed study of the Industry with several important aspects such as current market scenario, estimates, top investment pockets, recent trends, changing dynamics, and vibrant forces of the industry from 2019 to 2026 to identify the underlying opportunities. The report gives much focus on the prospects that may transpire soon and provide a significant boost to the overall market growth.

The report also covers the drivers that are playing a substantial role in fueling the Continuous Delivery market growth. At the same time, restraining factors that are expected to obstruct or hold the growth of the industry are also presented by our expert analysts to provide the key market players with a detailed scenario of the future threats in advance.

Revenue and Sales Estimation — Historical Revenue and sales volume is presented, and further data is triangulated with top-down and bottom-up approaches to forecast complete market size and to estimate forecast numbers for key regions covered in the report along with classified and well-recognized Types and end-use industry.

Continuous Delivery Market Segmentation

By Type,

On-premises
Cloud
By Application,

Banking, Financial Services, and Insurance (BFSI)
Telecommunications
Media and entertainment
Retail and eCommerce
Healthcare
Manufacturing
Education
Others (government, transport and logistics, and energy and utilities)
This study will provide a comprehensive outlook of the Continuous Delivery Industry It is vital you keep your market knowledge up to date segmented by Type, Applications, and major players. Also, classify different companies according to your targeted objective or geography and provide customization according to requirements.

Major Players in the Global Continuous Delivery market are

Moreover, Porter’s five forces analytical pattern exhibits the assertiveness of the market by assessing several parameters including threats of alternatives, the strength of the suppliers, and choice of the buyers operating in the industry.

Major Players Covered in this report are:

Atlassian
IBM
Xebialabs
CA Technologies
Electric Cloud
Puppet Enterprise
Chef Software
Cloudbees
Microsoft
Flexagon
Micro Focus
Clarive
Key Region Covered in Continuous Delivery Market are

North America (USA, Canada, and Mexico)
Europe (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Netherlands, Russia, Italy, and Rest of Europe)
Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, India, and Southeast Asia)
South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia, rest of countries, etc.)
Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Israel, Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa)
Highlights of the Report:

A detailed and exhaustive evaluation of the Continuous Delivery market.
Accrued revenues from each segment of the market from 2019 to 2026.
Drivers, restraints, and opportunities in the industry.
Approaches embraced by the key market players.
Provinces that would create multiple opportunities for the frontrunners in the industry.
Current scope and trends of the Continuous Delivery market.

Major Pointers in Table of Contents of Continuous Delivery Market Report are as follows:

Part 01: Executive Summary

Part 02: Scope of The Report

Part 03: Research Methodology

Part 04: Global Continuous Delivery Market Landscape
• Market Entropy
• Market segmentation analysis
• Market characteristics

Part 06: Global Continuous Delivery Market Sizing
• Market definition
• Market size and forecast
• Market sizing

Part 07: Global Continuous Delivery Market Segmentation
• Segmentation
• Market opportunity
• Comparison

Part 08: Customer Landscape
Part 10: Decision Framework
Part 09: Regional Landscape

In4Research

In4Research is a provider of world-class market research reports, customized solutions and consulting services, and high-quality market intelligence that firmly believes in empowering the success of its client’s successes in growing or improving their business. We combine a distinctive package of research reports and consulting services, global reach, and in-depth expertise in markets such as Chemicals and Materials, Food and Beverage, Energy, and Power that cannot be matched by our competitors. Our focus is on providing knowledge and solutions throughout the entire value chain of the industries we serve. We believe in providing premium high-quality insights at an affordable cost.

Global “Continuous Delivery Market” 2021 Research report produces information with reference to market size, share, trends, growth, cost structure, capacity, revenue, and forecast 2026. This report also contains the general and comprehensive study of the Continuous Delivery market with all its aspects influencing the growth of the market. This report is a full-scale quantitative survey of the Continuous Delivery industry and provides data for building strategies to expand the market growth and effectiveness.

The Continuous Delivery market has registered a CAGR of 19.75% over the forecast period 2021 – 2026. According to Perforce, 65% of managers, software developers, and executives report that their organizations have started the use of continuous delivery.

The competitive market players are identified along with their size, share, and strategies. The company profiles of these players, which includes their recent major developments, product portfolio, revenue, core competencies, and financials. Additionally, the report presents insights into the mergers & acquisitions, company profiles, financial status, product portfolio, and the SWOT analysis.

Cloud Deployment to Gain Significant Traction in the Continuous Delivery Market

– The implementation of continuous delivery tools on the cloud provides high scalability, flexibility, and sharing capabilities, with defined authority. The industry players into continuous delivery tools are utilizing the opportunity to tap the market.
– Continuous delivery tools provide DevOps capabilities that allow teams to collaborate, develop, test, deploy, and manage software on the cloud, in one place. This helps end users access everything and build new applications on the cloud.
– With the majority share of companies migrating their data to the cloud, industry players are offering cloud-based solutions to tap into the potential market opportunity within, which is likely to boost the market growth over the forecast period.
– Google announced Cloud Build, which helps to fully-managed continuous delivery and continuous integration platforms, helping to build, test, and deploy software quickly, at scale. In addition, organizations are rigorously investing in cloud computing, which is also expected to have a positive impact on the market growth over the forecast period.
– According to Morgan Stanley, public clouds account for just 20% of all computing workloads, but the percentage could increase to 48% by the end of 2020, driven by greater awareness in the benefits of the public cloud, thus impacting the growth of public cloud deployments.
– One of the prominent trends of the continuous delivery market is release management, planning, and release automation tools, which help to make it easier for DevOps applications and tools to deploy software to public or private clouds. Release automation tools, for instance, can save time by easily enabling the staff to set up deployment configurations as templates.

North America to Occupy Significant Market Share

– The North American region is projected to have the largest growth in demand due to the early adoption of cloud-based technologies and IoT by the United States. However, benefits, such as improved flexibility and agility as well as being able to implement new applications, also hold significance.
– Additionally, in the North American region, companies are adopting cloud-based applications, and it was estimated that nearly 35% of SMBs in the United States have already deployed cloud solutions. There have been a series of mergers, collaborations, and acquisitions in North America to take advantage of this opportunity. For instance, Steltix has partnered with Autodeploy to bring continuous deployment and delivery software suite to the European markets.
– With the emergence of new technologies, such as machine learning, AI, and predictive and prescriptive analytics, and the integration of these new technologies with continuous delivery models, organizations will be managed more effectively through rules, self-learning, data sets, and inference engines.
– The major driver behind these investments has been the continuous evolution of new technologies to utilize the volumes that were previously considered non-commercial. With these series of investments, retail, healthcare, communications, and manufacturing applications in North America are expected to hold a significant share in the market.

Important Features that are under offering and key highlights of the report:
– Detailed overview of the Continuous Delivery market
– Changing market dynamics of the industry
– In-depth market segmentation by Type, Application, etc.
– Historical, current, and projected market size in terms of volume and value
– Recent industry trends and developments
– Competitive landscape of the Continuous Delivery market
– Strategies of key players and product offerings
– Potential and niche segments/regions exhibiting promising growth
– A neutral perspective towards Continuous Delivery market performance
– Must-have information for market players to sustain and enhance their market footprint

The research includes historic data from 2015 to 2021 and forecasts until 2026 which makes the report an invaluable resource for industry executives, marketing, sales, and product managers, consultants, analysts, and stakeholders looking for key industry data in readily accessible documents with clearly presented tables and graphs.

Finally, the Continuous Delivery Market report is the believable source for gaining the market research that will exponentially accelerate your business. The report gives the principle locale, economic situations with the item value, benefit, limit, generation, supply, request and market development rate and figure and so on. Continuous Delivery industry report additionally Present new task SWOT examination, speculation attainability investigation, and venture return investigation.

VMware and Accenture have announced the launch of a business group aimed at guiding companies through their adoption of a cloud-first strategy, as part of a newly expanded partnership between the two organisations.

The Accenture VMware Business Group’s primary mission will be to encourage and accelerate migration to the cloud, build modern apps and use the cloud as a foundation for new business models. It is supported by around 2,000 Accenture cloud professionals trained in VMware services.

The move represents a multi-million dollar investment from both companies, which have a relationship spanning more than two decades.

“Cloud is the single most powerful tool for mastering change,” says Accenture CEO Julie Sweet.

“As organisations accelerate their move to the cloud and edge over the next few years, the Accenture VMware Business Group will help deliver the speed, scale and security they need to fundamentally reinvent their businesses and create more value.”

The new business group will make several new investments: training more Accenture employees in VMware tech, developing new service offerings based on VMware solutions, and go-to-market and sales operations. The two companies will also develop pre-engineered vertical industry solutions, including a platform to help telecommunications companies accelerate the rollout of 5G and edge computing services.

“To meet the demands of today’s unprecedented business environment, organisations must employ a multi-cloud strategy – more rapidly than ever before,” says VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger.

“Increasingly, customers are running their applications on one or more clouds, data centres and the edge and the Accenture VMware Business Group will bring together the world-class teams and expertise required, with the speed, agility, and resilience that organisations demand, today and tomorrow.”

Another development stemming from the Accenture VMware Business Group is the launch of a specialised VMware Cloud Migration Factory to migrate computing workloads to the cloud. The VMware Cloud Migration Factory will give clients access to resources to plan, test, migrate and modernise applications at scale to their preferred cloud.

“The pandemic brought about a new ‘next normal’ for organisations, one where they need to accelerate their use of cloud to modernise the business and serve as a foundation for innovation,” said Rick Villars, group vice president of worldwide research, IDC.

“They recognise that public, private and hybrid cloud all play a critical role in this transition and they require technology cloud partners and service providers who are able to execute the strategies and provide the skills needed to drive this transformation faster than ever before.”

Data security is significant for any college. Colleges regularly limit access to private information except if the users are approved. Simultaneously, in some cases, they need the flexibility to rapidly give certain offices access to the confidential information. At the point when the information is stored in a conventional, in-house datacenter, departments need IT’s support to change permissions for clients and groups. With the cloud, however, college administration can use user roles to rapidly give access to documents without calling the IT.

A few institutions intend to alleviate COVID-19 risks with abbreviated calendars and caps on class size, while others, similar to The California State University, say they’ll deliver the majority of its classes online. Whatever decision universities take, higher education seems ready to animate the speed of cloud adoption, both to support near-term activity and to build nimbleness to withstand future difficulties.

This into-the-cloud pattern is explored in another Forrester Consulting report, “HPC And AI in The Cloud: A Spotlight on Higher Education.” In this report covered by CIO, authorized by Dell Technologies and Intel, Forrester noticed that in a worldwide survey of IT decision-makers in higher education foundations, it discovered a developing interest in running HPC and AI workloads in hybrid cloud environments.

As of now, about a fourth of the respondents utilize public and private clouds to run HPC or AI workloads, Forrester says. Within the next year, there will be a reasonable move to the cloud. The survey reported that 31% of respondents intend to run HPC services in the public cloud and 35% of respondents intend to run AI and ML workloads in private clouds. This move is generally determined by a desire to improve overall infrastructure use and effectiveness, Forrester says.

A large part of the consideration on AI in higher ed education has been centered around its student-facing uses. That is mostly in light of the fact that schools have been able to utilize it to gain ground on a wide scope of objectives, from lessening summer melt through chatbots to teaching students Mandarin with AI-controlled simulations.

To alleviate the financial hit from the pandemic, colleges are evaluating cloud solutions, especially Software as a Service, to wipe out duplications. For instance, one choice is to relocate out of a paid storage solution and into one that is free or accessible under the current agreement.

Simultaneously, leaders will gauge the number of changes they need to impose on staff and workforce who are as of now adapting to a radical digital transformation. If users are committed to a specific solution, leaders may decide to hold it.

Despite the fact that HPC and AI services are generally run on-premises today, next year there will be a move towards more public and private cloud use. Driven by a want to enhance infrastructure utilization and efficiency, most universities in the future will work with an environment that includes on-premises and cloud options.

Adoption of the cloud is likewise acquiring speed in research. Google and Amazon Web Services (AWS) each dedicated $20 million worth of credits for researchers examining COVID-19, and Microsoft has pledged cloud computing resources to test and vaccine development initiatives.

It’s not just that teams are deciding to keep a few applications on a non-cloud foundation. IT teams are settling on infrastructure choices dependent on a bunch of business and application prerequisites. Furthermore, the reality is that HPC and AI workloads running in hybrid environments will prompt a huge number of business benefits that can assist companies with conquering the difficulties inborn in cloud relocation, while additionally giving profits for initial investments.

With everything taken into account, it bodes well for colleges to join the cloud revolution as they acquire huge flexibility, effectiveness, and financial benefits in doing as such. Colleges who haven’t yet made the transition can gain so much from the institutions who have. Harvard University is another illustration of how one of the world’s top learning and research foundations saw that it was so risky to depend on on-premise infrastructure. They chose to move to AWS, tackled their migration challenges and guaranteed uptime with 100% certainty.

LETTERS: The pandemic had accelerated digitalisation in 2020. The transformation predicted to take its course in the coming years was forced upon businesses within a couple of months. The concern for corporate Malaysia now is whether businesses can ride this wave through while maintaining competency, accountability, compliance and transparency?

Being a double-edged sword, digitalisation has been proven to bring about changes in the way we think, communicate, collaborate and conduct daily affairs. It enables innovation, making processes more efficient and creating new business models. It also poses significant implications for the area of compliance and business integrity.

Moreover, the need to fight corruption is also reflected with the enforcement of Section 17A, MACC (Amendment) Act 2018 on Corporate Liability which now criminalises those running corporations for acts of bribery committed by persons associated to it. The only defence in court for those in charge, would be to ensure preventive measures (adequate procedures) had been undertaken to mitigate the risks of bribery/corruption in the first place.

Such digitalisation, technological advancement with abundance of acquired data enables the use of new risk management tools to monitor and detect fraud/bribery/corruption automatically and provide digital solutions in improving third party due diligence. Notwithstanding that, e-procurement/e-tender solutions could offer a win-win situation for both the public and private sector in leveling the playing field between businesses and enhancing transparency.

The use of data analytics for risk assessments and continuous monitoring can complement qualitative methodologies, thereby reducing false positives and false negatives. However, data analytics is not a replacement for human judgment and professional scepticism. It compliments judgment/scepticism with identifiable and verifiable results through due statistical processes.

As we fraud examiners see things, the single most effective means to mitigate the risk of fraud within organisations is to increase the “perception of detection”. It is when individuals feel that they are being watched will they act in a manner acceptable to the organisation.

Take for instance, if payments are being made with illegal intent (eg. bribery), real-time monitoring of transactions via data analytics software will be able to pick up anomalies in these payments compared to those made in usual business practice.

The anomalies detected are based on algorithms developed through machine learning which in turn picks up those transactions that seem to be out of the norm as compared to historical activity of the organisation. It would be rather impossible for individuals in the organisation to predict which transactions are going to be picked up/highlighted by the software.

Knowing who you do business with is often another concern for both the public and private sector. Here, we see the adoption of tools being able to conduct background checks (including beneficial ownership of corporations, to an extent), with a global informational reach and review of relationships between parties concerned in an arrangement, with visualisation capabilities.

Gone are the days we rely on self-disclosure from individuals or corporations in attaining the right balance of due diligence information. Applicable software / tools are available to scavenge through public and private (with consent) domains / registers to acquire required information.

Organisations should also consider moving towards e-procurement/e-tender, vendor and document management solutions as well, which would enhance accountability and transparency while capturing the trail information and documentation concerning activities and transactions with external parties. This mitigates the risk of abuse in the procurement process, while highlighting non-compliances and misguided operational deficiencies.

Furthermore, digitalisation is enabling Board of Directors,

Senior Management and Compliance Officers get more timely information on compliance risks and enhances communication of rules and regulatory requirements.

Embracing technology for business integrity would be the way forward as we continue to pivot towards digitalisation. Future thought, however, will be on data protection and cyber security which needs to be accounted when adopting new tools for business improvement and integrity.

CAMBRIDGE, England–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Marking its fifth year examining the global tech community’s practices around DevOps and database development, Redgate’s 2021 State of Database DevOps Report will be unlike any other before it. In a year of unprecedented firsts with a global pandemic, IT professionals and database administrators evolved their database development practices in 2020. As DevOps adoption continues to rise, with 30% of respondents saying they had adopted DevOps practices in 2016 compared to 68% in the last report, numbers are expected to rise further to meet the new demands of remote work environments.

With the survey now open for participation until midnight GMT on December 15, Redgate will donate $1 to the World Health Organization’s COVID-19 Solidarity Response Fund for every submission received.

Redgate is marking the approach toward 2021 with notable achievements in its mission to provide IT teams with database DevOps tools and solutions that meet the most stringent compliance requirements, including:

Inclusion in the Gartner Hype Cycle for Agile and DevOps, 2020, with Redgate cited as a Sample Vendor in the Continuous Compliance Automation category. Research from Redgate’s 2020 State of Database DevOps Report pointed to compliance as a growing concern for companies. For Redgate, mention in the Gartner report strengthened the company’s commitment to supporting customers with a DevOps-focused approach to the database to balance the accelerated delivery that comes with DevOps, alongside the need to adhere to regulatory compliance.

The acquisition of the popular open source database migration tool, Flyway, was finalized in 2020, which meant that database development teams could better automate deployments across multiple platforms to ensure faster delivery without compromising on code quality. As experts on developing a portfolio of SQL Server tools, the Flyway acquisition pointed to a growing trend of companies adopting multiple databases. By bringing it all under one roof, Redgate could invest heavily in Flyway to secure the future of the community version of the tool, expand its portfolio to new markets, and solidify the company as experts on database DevOps.

In addition to Flyway, Redgate saw major product updates and launches this year, including SQL Monitor version 11, which gives IT teams the ability to monitor all of their servers, databases and instances, whether on-premises or in the cloud, all on one screen. With hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments growing fast amid the pandemic, SQL Monitor V. 11 allows database professionals to maintain the performance of their servers, wherever they are hosted. To address the growing need for sensitive data protection, Redgate released Data Masker 7.1, which masks sensitive data across database tables when moving information into production so developers can protect critical customer information, but still maintain the speed of delivery that customers expect.

Many of these updates were based on the knowledge that came from Redgate’s annual State of Database DevOps Report and State of Database Monitoring Report, which saw rising rates of adoption for both DevOps and automation, while highlighting the need for more advanced database monitoring and security solutions to manage the surge of cloud deployments and longer-term remote work environments, respectively. As business environments continue to adopt new strategies for 2021, Redgate remains ready to provide tools and support to best fit the changing needs of IT teams everywhere.

“2020 was a challenging year for every IT department, and I commend our Redgate employees for continuing to find those silver linings in difficult situations,” said Redgate CEO Simon Galbraith. “We’ve increased our support to customers, including offering free online technical courses, our staff launched a Coding Club to keep kids engaged away from classrooms, and we all celebrated together virtually for Redgate’s twenty-first birthday. We truly have the best team in the business and I’m immensely proud of what we’ve accomplished this year and looking forward to a brighter 2021.”..

Redgate makes ingeniously simple software used by over 800,000 IT professionals around the world and is the leading Database DevOps solutions provider. Redgate’s philosophy is to design highly usable, reliable tools which elegantly solve the problems developers and DBAs face every day and help them to adopt compliant database DevOps. As well as streamlining database development and preventing the database being a bottleneck, this helps organizations introduce data protection by design and by default. As a result, more than 100,000 companies use Redgate tools, including 91% of those in the Fortune 100.

Halloween is upon us, and while much of the world is focused on scary creatures like ghosts, ghouls, or werewolves, DevSecOps teams have a few scary creatures of their own to deal with.

From the Dracula-like developer stuck in a world from centuries ago who is thwarting the creation of secure apps, to the DevOps ghosts that downplay the importance of app vulnerabilities, it’s important for DevSecOps teams to understand the threats that may be lurking in their own teams.

First off, there are the Dracula-like developers who are stuck centuries in the past. According to Dennis Hurst, founder of Saltworks Security, these developers exist out of a desire not to change the way they write code. “We run into this a lot, of ‘we’ve always built an application this way, why do I need to security test it?’ And they’re not sort of realizing that these applications are now on the internet, they’re public facing, or they’re connected to things that are on the internet, or they’re running in a cloud infrastructure so it’s no longer a nice sort of happy data center,” said Hurst.

According to Hurst, the way for teams to overcome these Dracula-like team members is to have clear leadership. “Without strong leadership, team members feel free to keep doing what they have always done, which stifles innovation,” he said.

Another scary member of the DevSecOps team to look out for are DevOps ghosts, in other words, shadow IT. According to Hurst, these are the people that believe “they can just magically go around all of IT and go straight to the cloud. The applications are there, sort of like ghosts, you hear them rattling around and you know that they’re there but you don’t actually see them, nobody knows about them, they’re kind of – maybe they’ll be there. We see this a lot in security where we find applications running on the internet that no one knew about.”

Hurst added that this isn’t a rare occurrence; it’s actually fairly common, especially with more employees working from home. People go home and take their laptops with them, so how do you secure that?

“A lot of companies have jumped to the cloud for some parts of their business because of COVID, maybe they couldn’t get to the data center,” said Hurst. “So it’s just easier for people to get in their mind that ‘oh, I can just stand this application up in the cloud and when this is all over with we’ll figure out how to get it back in-house.’ We’re definitely seeing it more. We’re seeing more people going to the cloud, maybe using a corporate credit card to open the accounts even, so it’s not even a corporate owned account even, it’s just somebody’s personal credit card that they use to stand up a website somewhere, we see that more than we would like.”

Hurst believes that using monitoring systems is one of the biggest ways to protect against shadow IT. He explained that there are services that monitor the internet looking for properties that point back to or are linked to the company’s IT infrastructure. A big downside is that there isn’t really a proactive way of preventing someone from spinning up a service on their own. “Anyone can go out and stand up a website, but you can monitor to see when it happens. The faster you can address it, the easier it is to manage,” said Hurst. “So if a website is stood up for a day, it’s pretty easy to take that down or get them to move it. If it’s there for 6 months or a year, doing business, it becomes much stickier and challenging to get pulled out because you’re taking business offline.”

From Third Place to Serious Contender

Just a few years before this article was originally written, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) was widely considered a distant third-place player in the cloud computing market. Amazon Web Services (AWS) dominated the space, and Alphabet’s Google Cloud occupied a scrappy second-place position. Microsoft’s cloud ambitions were treated skeptically by analysts and investors alike.

By mid-2019, that picture had changed substantially. Amazon remained the clear market leader, but Microsoft had firmly claimed the number-two position globally and was growing faster than any of its major rivals in key segments. The turnaround offers a useful case study in how a legacy software company can successfully pivot to cloud-first infrastructure and services.

The Cloud Market Context (2019 Figures)

According to market research firm Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market was forecast to reach $214.3 billion in 2019, representing 17.5% growth over the $182.4 billion recorded the prior year. Within that market, cloud system infrastructure services — the segment where AWS and Azure compete most directly — was projected to grow 27.5% in 2019, reaching $38.9 billion.

These are significant tailwinds for any provider operating at scale. Enterprise adoption of cloud infrastructure was accelerating as organizations moved workloads off on-premises hardware for reasons of cost, scalability, and operational agility.

Azure’s Growth Rate and Market Share

As of mid-2019, Amazon held approximately 31.5% market share in cloud infrastructure services. Microsoft did not publicly disclose standalone Azure revenue figures at the time — a practice that frustrated some analysts — but reported growth metrics told a compelling story. Azure’s infrastructure segment grew 63.6% year-over-year during Q2 2019, outpacing all major competitors in percentage terms.

Total cloud revenue for Microsoft’s fiscal fourth quarter (ended June 30, 2019) was $33.7 billion, up 12% year-over-year. Commercial cloud revenue specifically grew 39% year-over-year to $11 billion in that same quarter — described at the time as the strongest three-month period on record for that segment of the business.

Office 365 Commercial was a major contributor, with revenue up 31% year-over-year, demonstrating that Microsoft’s cloud story was not limited to raw infrastructure but extended across productivity and collaboration software as well.

The Satya Nadella Effect: A Cloud-First Strategic Pivot

Microsoft’s cloud transformation is closely linked to the leadership of CEO Satya Nadella, who took the helm in February 2014. Prior to Nadella, Microsoft’s culture was heavily oriented around its Windows and Office franchises — perpetual-license, on-premises software products. Nadella shifted the company’s mission toward cloud and mobile, investing heavily in Azure infrastructure, developer tooling, and hybrid cloud capabilities.

This wasn’t a superficial rebranding exercise. Microsoft poured billions of dollars into data center expansion, research and development, and strategic acquisitions. The result was a platform capable of competing across multiple cloud service categories: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS). Few vendors could credibly claim leadership positions across all three, and that breadth allowed Microsoft to generate recurring revenue from both enterprise and consumer customers simultaneously.

Bundling Strategy: Azure Plus Office as a Competitive Lever

One of Microsoft’s more effective competitive moves was bundling Azure with its Office product suite. Rather than competing with AWS purely on infrastructure pricing and features, Microsoft offered enterprise customers a compelling combined value proposition: migrate your workloads to Azure, and your workforce already has access to Microsoft 365 productivity and collaboration tools.

This strategy showed tangible results. In July 2019, Microsoft announced a $2 billion deal with AT&T (NYSE: T) to move the majority of the telecom provider’s non-network workloads to the public cloud by 2024. The deal also included AT&T’s workforce adopting Microsoft 365 tools — a clear example of the bundle strategy working at enterprise scale.

Ecosystem and Partnership Expansion

Beyond its own product portfolio, Microsoft was actively building a partner ecosystem to round out Azure’s capabilities. Partnerships with Oracle, Adobe, Dell Technologies, and SAP, among others, helped Microsoft address enterprise requirements that its own platform might not fully cover — and made Azure a more attractive destination for large organizations with complex, heterogeneous IT environments.

These partnerships also served a strategic purpose: by working with vendors that enterprises already rely on, Microsoft reduced the friction of cloud migration and positioned Azure as an integration-friendly platform rather than a closed ecosystem.

What This Means for DevOps and Engineering Teams

For DevOps practitioners and engineering leaders, Microsoft’s cloud trajectory in this period had several practical implications:

• Broader toolchain integration: Azure’s growth meant deeper native integration with GitHub (acquired by Microsoft in 2018), Azure DevOps pipelines, and Visual Studio Code — tools many engineering teams already used.
• Hybrid cloud investment: Microsoft’s Azure Arc and hybrid cloud capabilities expanded, reflecting enterprise demand for workloads that span on-premises and cloud environments.
• Enterprise deal momentum: Large-scale enterprise contracts (like the AT&T deal) signaled Azure’s increasing readiness for mission-critical workloads, which influenced procurement decisions at competing organizations.
• Competitive pricing pressure on AWS: Microsoft’s aggressive growth in market share created pricing and feature competition that benefited cloud customers across the board.

Analyst Outlook at the Time

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, cited in the original Motley Fool reporting, noted an acceleration of large enterprise cloud deals during Q2 2019 in both the United States and Europe, with Microsoft positioned to win a significant share of them. Wedbush projected that cloud would account for roughly 55% of enterprise workloads by 2022, up from approximately 30% at the time of writing — a forecast that, if accurate, represented substantial runway for continued Azure growth.

Some analysts went as far as predicting Microsoft would eventually surpass Amazon to claim the top position in cloud infrastructure — a view that remained contested but reflected the pace of Azure’s gains.

Historical Perspective

This article was originally written in September 2019. The cloud computing landscape has evolved significantly since then — Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud have all continued to grow, and market share dynamics have shifted. Readers should treat the specific figures cited here (market share percentages, revenue numbers, analyst forecasts) as historical data points rather than current benchmarks. For current market analysis, consult up-to-date research from Gartner, IDC, or Synergy Research Group.

Original reporting by Donna Fuscaldo via The Motley Fool. Disclosure information from the original article: The Motley Fool owned shares of and recommended Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft at the time of publication. Donna Fuscaldo held no position in any of the stocks mentioned.

VMware’s Security Ambition: A Multi-Year Build

By mid-2019, VMware had quietly assembled a significant cybersecurity portfolio. The company’s $2.1 billion acquisition of Carbon Black in August 2019 drew headlines, but it was the culmination of a deliberate, multi-year strategy rather than an opportunistic purchase.

The groundwork was laid as far back as 2014, when VMware acquired AirWatch to gain mobile device management and security capabilities. In 2016, VMware introduced micro-segmentation as a core feature of its NSX software-defined networking product, allowing security policies to be enforced at the workload level rather than solely at the network perimeter.

The security push intensified in 2018. In the first half of that year alone, VMware acquired CloudCoreo, a cloud security posture management startup, and E8 Security, a provider of AI-assisted behavioral analytics for threat detection. VMware also brought in Tom Gillis — a security industry veteran and co-founder of Bracket Computing — to lead its networking and security business unit.

The pace accelerated further in August 2019. On August 15, VMware acquired Veriflow, a network verification and intent-based networking firm. Within days, it purchased security startup Intrinsic. Then, within 48 hours of that deal, VMware announced the Carbon Black acquisition.

“We dated, and it just became obvious that there was so much synergy between our leadership and theirs. It was a super exciting week, and the culmination of a lot of work among an army of people to get us to where we are. There really is an opportunity to transform the industry.”

— Tom Barsi, SVP Business Development, Carbon Black, speaking at VMworld 2019

Fixing a ‘Broken’ Industry

VMware’s executives were blunt about their diagnosis of the enterprise security market. At his VMworld 2019 keynote, COO Sanjay Poonen described the security landscape as fragmented and dysfunctional.

“It’s a broken industry with 5,000 vendors. We looked at this industry and said, ‘There’s got to be a better way.'”

— Sanjay Poonen, COO, VMware, VMworld 2019 keynote

The integration story between VMware and Carbon Black predated the acquisition by more than two years. The companies had collaborated on VMware’s AppDefense product, which used hypervisor-level visibility to monitor and protect application workloads. Carbon Black’s telemetry was integrated into AppDefense, giving security operations teams a view into workload behavior that had previously been inaccessible from above the hypervisor layer.

“We built that integration exclusively. For the first time, the security operations center had been able to have visibility into the hypervisor. That’s when we started to see the potential and the opportunity.”

— Tom Barsi, Carbon Black

Carbon Black’s Platform: EDR, NGAV, and Bridging SecOps with IT Ops

Carbon Black’s product portfolio at the time of acquisition included several key capabilities:

• Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR): Continuous recording of endpoint activity to detect, investigate, and respond to advanced threats.
• Next-Generation Antivirus (NGAV): Behavioral-based prevention designed to catch threats that signature-based tools miss.
• LiveOps: A real-time endpoint query tool enabling system administrators to perform investigations and remote remediation from a single cloud-native platform without deploying additional agents.
• Workload Protection: Integration with VMware AppDefense to secure virtualized workloads at the hypervisor level.

Beyond the individual products, Carbon Black positioned itself as a bridge between two traditionally siloed teams: security operations centers (SOCs) and IT operations staff. The tension between these groups is a well-documented operational challenge — security teams want to isolate and shut down affected systems, while IT operations teams are focused on maintaining uptime.

“We see the opportunity to eliminate that friction and create an opportunity between those two. There’s friction because the ‘SecOps guys’ are saying, ‘Take the server down if there’s a problem’ and ‘IT ops guys’ are saying, ‘I’ve got runtime; I’ve got to keep it up.’ Now you have the opportunity to identify a threat and the ability to seamlessly leverage VMware’s infrastructure management tools to instantly remediate and orchestrate a problem without the conflict with IT and security operations.”

— Tom Barsi, Carbon Black

From Second Place to First: VMware’s Acquisition Track Record as a Blueprint

At the time of the Carbon Black deal, the endpoint security market was dominated by CrowdStrike. VMware’s Sanjay Poonen acknowledged publicly at VMworld that Carbon Black sat in second position behind CrowdStrike in the cloud-native endpoint security space. CrowdStrike’s market valuation at the time was reported at over $11 billion, compared with the $2.1 billion VMware paid for Carbon Black.

Barsi and VMware leadership pointed to two previous acquisitions as evidence that second place was not a permanent position:

• Nicira (acquired 2012, ~$1.2 billion): The technology became the foundation for VMware NSX, VMware’s flagship software-defined networking product, which went on to generate substantial recurring revenue.
• AirWatch (acquired 2014, ~$1.5 billion): AirWatch was not the market leader in mobile device management at the time of purchase. Under VMware, it evolved into the Workspace ONE platform, which CEO Pat Gelsinger cited as a commercial success during earnings calls around the time of the Carbon Black announcement.

“It’s what they’ve done with Nicira, what they’ve done with AirWatch and WorkspaceONE, and their ability to take a business from no revenues to a couple hundred billion. I believe we can take our position as number two and be number one.”

— Tom Barsi, Carbon Black

The Data Advantage: NSX Telemetry Meets Carbon Black’s Security Cloud

Beyond the commercial rationale, a key technical argument for the combination was data. VMware’s NSX micro-segmentation had, over years of deployment across large enterprise virtual machine estates, generated a substantial volume of network behavior telemetry. The hypothesis was that combining this infrastructure-level data with Carbon Black’s endpoint security cloud could enable threat detection and analysis at a scale that neither company could reach independently.

VMware’s partner and customer ecosystem — reported at approximately 75,000 partners and 500,000 customers at the time — also represented a ready distribution channel for Carbon Black’s platform that would have taken years to build independently. Additionally, VMware’s parent company Dell Technologies brought access to the broader Dell EMC ecosystem, including established security brands such as RSA and Secureworks.

“The best way to secure enterprise is to integrate security into the actual infrastructure. The opportunity is to leverage the infrastructure management and security portfolio that VMware has and sprinkle in the Carbon Black capabilities. By integrating it across that portfolio, you have the ability to transform the security space and now you’re coming up with intrinsic security.”

— Tom Barsi, Carbon Black

Leadership Continuity and Deal Timeline

Although the acquisition was announced in August 2019, the deal was not expected to close until early 2020, pending regulatory review. To signal continuity, VMware moved quickly to secure Carbon Black’s leadership team. Carbon Black’s then-CEO Patrick Morley was designated to lead a newly formed VMware security business unit. Offer letters were extended to Carbon Black’s chief operating officer and chief product officer as well.

The speed and deliberateness of those retention moves reflected the strategic importance VMware placed on Carbon Black — not merely as a product acquisition, but as the organizational core of a broader security business.

What ‘Intrinsic Security’ Means in Practice

The phrase “intrinsic security” became a central part of VMware’s security messaging in 2019. The concept is straightforward: rather than bolting security tools onto infrastructure as an afterthought, security capabilities should be built directly into the virtualization and networking layers where VMware already operates.

In practical terms, this means:

• Endpoint behavior monitoring delivered through the same agent or hypervisor instrumentation already present in VMware environments, reducing the need for separate endpoint agents.
• Network micro-segmentation enforced through NSX policies, limiting lateral movement by attackers inside the data center.
• Unified visibility across endpoint, workload, and network layers within a single platform, reducing the operational overhead of managing multiple point products.
• Automated remediation that can leverage VMware’s infrastructure management APIs to isolate, snapshot, or restore workloads without manual intervention.

Whether VMware fully delivered on this vision in the years following the acquisition is a separate question — but the architectural logic articulated at VMworld 2019 reflected a coherent and technically grounded security strategy.

Original reporting by SiliconAngle. Interview conducted by Dave Vellante and John Walls of theCUBE at VMworld 2019, San Francisco.

How the DevOps Tool Market Is Segmented

Market research reports covering the DevOps tooling space typically break down the opportunity along three primary dimensions: product maturity tier, deployment model, and end-user industry vertical. Understanding these segments helps engineering leaders benchmark their own toolchain decisions against broader adoption trends.

By Product Maturity Tier

Vendors and their offerings are commonly classified according to how deeply DevOps practices are embedded in the product:

• DevOps Capable – Tools that can support DevOps workflows but require significant configuration or third-party integrations to do so.
• DevOps Ready – Products designed with DevOps practices in mind, shipping with native integrations for version control, CI/CD, and monitoring.
• DevOps Enabled – Fully opinionated platforms built around DevOps principles end-to-end, including built-in feedback loops, policy enforcement, and observability.

By Deployment Mode

• Cloud (SaaS/PaaS) – Hosted solutions managed by the vendor, favoured for rapid onboarding and elastic scaling.
• On-Premises – Self-hosted deployments, preferred by organisations with strict data-residency, compliance, or air-gap requirements.

By Industry Vertical

Demand for DevOps tooling spans multiple sectors, each with distinct compliance, release-velocity, and integration requirements:

• Banking, Financial Services & Insurance (BFSI) – High regulatory scrutiny drives demand for auditable pipelines and change-control tooling.
• Information Technology – The largest adopter segment; software product companies and IT services firms are early and heavy users.
• Telecom – Network function virtualisation and rapid service rollout create strong demand for infrastructure-as-code and container orchestration tools.
• Retail – E-commerce pressure and seasonal traffic spikes push adoption of cloud-native delivery and canary-release strategies.
• Other Verticals – Healthcare, manufacturing, and public sector organisations are emerging adopters.

Major Vendors in the DevOps Tool Market

The report identifies several established technology companies as significant participants in the DevOps tooling ecosystem as of 2019. Their involvement ranges from CI/CD and configuration management to containerisation and end-to-end platform delivery:

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) – ALM, testing, and IT operations tooling integrated into DevOps pipelines.
• Cisco Systems – Network automation and infrastructure provisioning relevant to infrastructure-as-code workflows.
• CA Technologies (now Broadcom) – Agile planning, release automation, and mainframe DevOps tooling.
• Docker, Inc. – Container runtime and image management; foundational to modern CI/CD pipelines.
• Puppet Labs – Infrastructure automation and configuration management at scale.
• IBM – Cloud-native development platforms, UrbanCode Deploy, and AI-assisted operations tooling.
• Spirent Communications – Test automation for network and application performance validation.
• Chef (now Progress) – Policy-as-code and infrastructure automation for compliance-driven environments.
• Red Hat (now IBM) – OpenShift container platform, Ansible automation, and enterprise Linux tooling.
• Microsoft – Azure DevOps (formerly VSTS), GitHub Actions, and a broad SaaS delivery pipeline.

Key Market Drivers and Restraints

Drivers

• Growing demand for faster, more frequent software releases without sacrificing stability.
• Widespread cloud adoption reducing barriers to deploying sophisticated toolchains.
• Increasing organisational maturity around agile methodologies creating a natural pull toward DevOps practices.
• Competitive pressure forcing even traditionally slow-moving industries (banking, telecom) to shorten time-to-market.

Restraints

• Cultural resistance to breaking down silos between development, QA, and operations teams.
• Skills gaps: DevOps toolchains require cross-functional expertise that many teams are still building.
• Integration complexity when layering new tools on top of legacy systems and processes.
• Security and compliance concerns, particularly for on-premises-to-cloud migrations in regulated industries.

Research Methodology Considerations

Market research firms covering the DevOps space typically use a triangulated methodology: combining primary research (interviews with vendors, channel partners, and enterprise decision-makers) with secondary research (public filings, press releases, and industry databases). Forecast models project revenue estimates, compound annual growth rates (CAGRs), and share shifts across segments and regions. Customised versions of such reports can be commissioned to focus on specific geographies or use cases.

Engineering teams and procurement managers should treat market research outputs as directional inputs rather than precise benchmarks. Vendor positioning and product capabilities change significantly between annual report cycles, particularly in a space as dynamic as DevOps tooling.

What This Means for DevOps Teams

Understanding the competitive landscape helps organisations make more informed toolchain decisions. A few practical takeaways:

• Evaluate maturity tier fit before purchasing: a “DevOps Capable” tool may require months of integration work a smaller team cannot afford.
• Deployment model choice has long-term implications: SaaS reduces operational overhead but creates vendor dependency; on-premises preserves control at the cost of maintenance burden.
• Vertical-specific requirements matter: a BFSI team needs audit trails and policy enforcement that a pure-play startup toolchain may not provide out of the box.
• Consolidation is ongoing: several vendors listed here have since been acquired or merged (CA into Broadcom, Chef into Progress, Red Hat deepened into IBM), meaning product roadmaps and licensing models may have changed materially since 2019.

Original market overview sourced from Daily Research Chronicle (2019), citing Crystal Market Research data. Specific forecast figures and CAGR values from the source report are not reproduced here as they could not be independently verified.

I recently had the pleasure of moderating a lively discussion with security leaders at the SINET Innovation Summit 2019 in New York. The conversation explored one central question: Can security and DevOps coexist? 

DevOps is a well-adopted practice that fosters an agile relationship between development and IT operations by advocating better communication and collaboration between these two business units. Every organization represented on the panel (including two of the largest financial services companies) have mature DevOps programs with security baked into their practices.

I’ll provide my own insights on this topic, lay out key takeaways from the discussion and address challenges companies face as they adopt secure DevOps. 

Second Place Is The First Loser: Security Works To Win the Race

We have arrived at an inflection point for the modern software development life cycle. The conjoining of the engineering side of many organizations with IT operations has been a necessity in the age of rapid digital transformation. DevOps, the agile relationship between the two, has led many development and operation groups to excel at swiftly iterating and delivering new software products and updates across devices, applications, networks and more. As an example, Netflix engineers allegedly release code thousands of times every day to stay ahead of fierce competitors like Hulu and Amazon Prime. 

A common trait of the organizations represented on the panel is the understanding of — and execution on — the fact that security needs to be inserted into DevOps to ensure that it does not get left behind. 

No company can escape the impact software innovation is having on their business, so they can’t compete if they aren’t investing in software development. At one of the companies represented on the panel, the CIO recently took on the responsibility of managing the entire development team, which is growing by leaps and bounds.

As development and IT (and security by extension) are increasingly coming together under the CIO, the security leaders on the panel were clear that inserting security into DevOps is a mindset and a shared responsibility. Within their organizations, everyone involved in the process has a role to play when it comes to enhancing security. For example, application architects who are responsible for the very first phase of DevOps — the application’s requirements — have a great vantage point to do certain aspects of security that cannot be done anywhere else.

We also discussed the notion of following a blueprint of “shifting security left” in the modern software development lifecycle instead of doing security at the end. It didn’t work yesterday and it won’t work as we continue to move toward a world where the only way to beat the competition is to deliver new functionality to your customers faster and securely.

Avoid Cloud Vendor Lock-In

Panelists also emphasized that deploying applications in hybrid- and multicloud environments as a way to create seamless, automated and secure environments for larger institutions while avoiding cloud vendor lock-in. If we consider this from a DevOps perspective, during deployments, it is critical for companies to mimic processes across all clouds to ensure that security is influential. 

Application Security Becomes Key, But It Can’t Be A Burden

One reality many participants face when integrating security with DevOps is the cost of managing security. Billions are spent on network and endpoint security today. The problem is that when organizations are developing software and deploying in the cloud, all of those tools become far less valuable. This is when application security becomes key. 

Inserting security into DevOps has to make it easy for developers. As they move faster, they can’t be burdened by waiting for and interpreting scan results to fix vulnerabilities. 

Software code has two states — a source code form and a running-in-production form. If we bridge the knowledge of both of these states, we can address the security of this explosion of code much more easily and accurately in the midst of the agile software development life cycle, all without burning out the development team. 

Convert Security Requirements Into Code

A significant reason that DevOps adoption is growing is that much of what IT has done historically is now automated through code. In the past, when a new application was ready for production, IT needed to manually buy or provision a server, deploy it and install the application. Now they use code to provision a server on Amazon Web Services or Azure and run the application, almost automatically. What used to take days now takes minutes or seconds.

Something similar needs to happen with security within DevOps. Determining the security requirements for a particular app today is very manual: Security will ask developers what kind of data the app handles and then provide the requirements (e.g., requirements for a mobile banking app are very high). Successful organizations use application security tools to scan the application to determine the data it handles and convert requirements into code automatically. 

Don’t Overlook The Software Supply Chain

More and more applications that companies build today use third-party software, including open source libraries and frameworks (in the case of one company we work with, up to 80-90% of an application’s code comes from third parties). The concern is that if developers use more third-party software, it creates more paths for bad actors to hack an application. The discussion among the panelists on this point focused on ensuring that the software supply chain is taken into account as part of inserting security into the DevOps process. 

When reflecting on the SINET conversation as a whole, it was great to see how some of the largest and most influential companies are viewing the intersection of DevOps and security and the steps being taken to bridge the gap between the two. My subsequent articles for this column will dig deeper into the takeaways summarized here.

The Market Landscape

As of the period this analysis was originally written (mid-2019), AWS held roughly one-third of the public cloud infrastructure market, according to Synergy Research data cited in the original source. Azure held approximately 16 percent and GCP around 8 percent. IBM Cloud and Alibaba Cloud were also growing, and a long tail of Tier 2 and Tier 3 providers—Rackspace, Oracle Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and others—were competing for the remainder.

At a rough, generalised level, the three leaders tend to attract different buyers:

• AWS is used across the widest range of organisations, from start-ups to large enterprises, and across almost every industry vertical.
• Azure is a natural fit for enterprises already running Microsoft software stacks, including Windows Server, Active Directory, SQL Server, and Office 365.
• Google Cloud is particularly popular with developer-centric teams, data engineering workloads, and organisations that are open-source or Kubernetes-first.

These are broad generalisations. The right platform depends on your specific workloads, existing tooling, team expertise, and cost model—not on market share alone.

Pricing Models: An Important Differentiator

One concrete difference between the three platforms—at least as documented at the time of the original article—is how they meter compute time:

• AWS historically billed per hour for EC2 instances, meaning a job that ran for two minutes was billed as a full hour. (AWS later introduced per-second billing for many instance types; verify current billing behaviour for the specific services you use.)
• Azure bills per minute for its virtual machine compute, which can reduce waste for short-lived workloads.
• Google Cloud also bills per minute (with per-second granularity on some products), and applies sustained-use discounts automatically without requiring reserved instance commitments.

Beyond per-unit rates, enterprises should model total cost of ownership including data egress fees, support tiers, reserved capacity discounts, and licensing bundling (particularly relevant for Azure if you hold existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreements).

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

What Is AWS?

Amazon Web Services launched in 2006 and is the commercial cloud computing division of Amazon. It offers a broad portfolio spanning compute (EC2, Lambda), storage (S3, EBS, Glacier), databases (RDS, DynamoDB, Aurora), networking (VPC, CloudFront, Route 53), machine learning, security, and much more. Services are available as IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS offerings and are designed to compose with one another, allowing teams to build scalable, distributed architectures.

AWS Strengths

• First-mover advantage and maturity. AWS launched before any serious competitor and used that head start to build the broadest service catalogue and the largest global network of regions and availability zones.
• Depth of services. No other provider matches the raw number of distinct managed services AWS offers, which is an advantage for teams that want to avoid running their own infrastructure for niche requirements.
• Ecosystem and community. AWS has the largest pool of third-party tooling, training resources, certified professionals, and marketplace offerings.
• Enterprise credibility. Gartner has repeatedly recognised AWS as the most mature enterprise-ready cloud IaaS provider in its Magic Quadrant reports.

AWS Weaknesses

• Cost complexity. AWS pricing is notoriously difficult to model. The large number of services, instance types, and pricing dimensions can lead to bill shock if workloads are not carefully monitored and optimised.
• Data egress costs. Extracting large volumes of data out of AWS storage can be expensive. Teams should understand egress pricing before committing to an architecture that requires frequent large data transfers.
• Service sprawl. The breadth of the catalogue is also a source of cognitive overhead. Choosing between overlapping services requires deep expertise.

Microsoft Azure

What Is Azure?

Microsoft Azure launched in 2010 and is Microsoft’s public cloud platform. It provides IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS services spanning virtual machines, Kubernetes (AKS), serverless functions (Azure Functions), SQL and NoSQL databases, Active Directory integration, DevOps pipelines (Azure DevOps), analytics, and AI services. A defining characteristic of Azure is its tight integration with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem: Windows Server, Active Directory, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365.

Azure Strengths

• Microsoft stack integration. Organisations running Windows Server, Active Directory, SQL Server, or .NET applications on-premises can lift workloads to Azure with less friction than to competing platforms. Hybrid connectivity via Azure Arc and Azure Stack further supports incremental migration.
• Licensing economics. Existing Microsoft Enterprise Agreement customers can apply Azure Hybrid Benefit licences, which can significantly reduce compute costs for Windows and SQL Server workloads.
• Identity and security. Azure Active Directory (now Entra ID) is the industry’s dominant cloud identity platform and integrates natively across Azure services, making it straightforward to enforce role-based access control at scale.
• DevOps tooling. Azure DevOps and GitHub (also owned by Microsoft) offer end-to-end CI/CD, repository management, and project tracking that integrate tightly with Azure deployments.

Azure Weaknesses

• Enterprise support experience. Gartner has noted that despite Microsoft’s long enterprise software history, some Azure customers report that the support, documentation, and partner ecosystem feel less polished than expected.
• Linux and open-source maturity. While Azure has significantly improved its Linux and open-source support over time, teams running predominantly Linux workloads may find AWS or GCP more natural environments.
• Service reliability history. Azure has experienced notable outages, some of which have affected Active Directory and dependent services broadly. Verify current SLA commitments and design for multi-region resilience.

Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

What Is GCP?

Google Cloud Platform launched in 2008 and is Google’s public cloud offering. It provides compute (Compute Engine, GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Functions), storage (Cloud Storage, Persistent Disk), managed databases (Cloud SQL, Cloud Spanner, Bigtable, Firestore), big data and analytics (BigQuery, Dataflow, Pub/Sub), and AI/ML services (Vertex AI, Vision API, Speech-to-Text). GCP is also the origin of Kubernetes—Google open-sourced the project in 2014—which gives it particular credibility in container orchestration.

GCP Strengths

• Kubernetes and container expertise. Google invented Kubernetes and runs it at scale internally. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is widely regarded as the most feature-complete managed Kubernetes offering.
• Data analytics and ML. BigQuery, Dataflow, and Vertex AI reflect decades of internal tooling that Google built to process its own data at global scale. These services are a strong fit for data engineering and machine learning workloads.
• Network performance. GCP runs on Google’s private global fibre network, which can deliver low-latency data transfer between regions and high throughput for distributed applications.
• Pricing transparency and sustained-use discounts. GCP automatically applies sustained-use discounts when VMs run for a significant portion of the month, without requiring upfront reserved instance commitments.
• Open-source and DevOps alignment. GCP is a popular choice for organisations that standardise on open-source tooling and DevOps-first workflows, partly because it avoids the Microsoft lock-in that Azure implies and offers a different competitive dynamic than AWS.

GCP Weaknesses

• Smaller service catalogue. GCP offers fewer distinct managed services than AWS and, in some categories, fewer configuration options.
• Fewer global regions. At the time of the original article, GCP had fewer data centre regions than AWS or Azure, though it has expanded significantly since then.
• Enterprise sales and support maturity. GCP has historically been seen as less enterprise-sales-focused than AWS or Microsoft. Gartner noted that clients typically chose GCP as a secondary rather than primary strategic provider.
• Product discontinuation history. Google has a documented history of discontinuing products and services. Engineering teams should evaluate the long-term strategic commitment to any GCP service before building a dependency on it.

Choosing the Right Platform: Practical Guidance

No single cloud is best for all workloads. A practical evaluation framework should consider:

1. Existing technology stack. Heavy Microsoft workloads (Windows Server, SQL Server, Active Directory) favour Azure. Java, Python, and Linux-native workloads run well on all three; GCP and AWS may require less friction.
2. Data and analytics requirements. BigQuery and GCP’s analytics ecosystem are strong differentiators for data-intensive use cases.
3. Compliance and sovereignty. Verify which providers hold the certifications relevant to your industry (SOC 2, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, HIPAA BAA, PCI DSS) and whether they have regions in the geographies you need.
4. Team expertise. The cloud your engineers already know is often the fastest to deliver value on, regardless of theoretical feature advantages elsewhere.
5. Cost modelling. Model total cost across compute, storage, egress, and support for your specific anticipated workload profile—not just headline instance prices.
6. Multi-cloud strategy. Many large enterprises use more than one provider. This adds operational complexity but reduces lock-in risk and lets you match workloads to the platform that fits them best.

Summary Comparison

The public cloud market continues to evolve rapidly. Market share figures, service catalogues, pricing structures, and regional availability all change frequently. Treat this comparison as a starting framework and validate specifics against current provider documentation before making architectural decisions.

Global DevOps Market Overview

The DevOps market has been one of the fastest-growing segments in enterprise software and IT services. According to market research data published in 2019, the Global DevOps Market was valued at approximately USD 3.62 billion in 2018 and was projected to reach USD 20.01 billion by 2026, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of roughly 24.7% between 2019 and 2026.

This growth reflects widespread enterprise adoption of DevOps practices — combining development and operations teams, automating software delivery pipelines, and embracing continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) — as organizations sought to accelerate release cycles and improve software reliability.

Key Market Drivers

Several factors were identified as driving DevOps market expansion during this period:

• Demand for faster software delivery: Businesses increasingly needed to ship features and fixes rapidly to remain competitive, pushing adoption of CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks.
• Cloud adoption: The shift to public and hybrid cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) created natural alignment with DevOps toolchains and infrastructure-as-code practices.
• Digital transformation initiatives: Large enterprises across banking, retail, healthcare, and manufacturing invested heavily in modernizing legacy application delivery, driving demand for DevOps consulting, tooling, and training.
• Microservices and containerization: The rise of Docker and Kubernetes accelerated DevOps adoption by enabling teams to deploy and scale discrete application components independently.
• Security integration (DevSecOps): Growing regulatory and compliance pressures pushed security practices earlier into the software development lifecycle, expanding the scope and spend within the DevOps ecosystem.

Market Restraints

Despite strong growth, the research identified factors that could slow adoption:

• Cultural resistance: DevOps requires significant organizational change. Siloed teams and legacy management structures created friction in many enterprises.
• Skills shortage: A persistent lack of engineers with cross-functional expertise in development, operations, and automation tooling constrained implementation timelines.
• Complexity of toolchain integration: Organizations managing heterogeneous on-premises and cloud environments faced challenges integrating diverse DevOps tools into coherent pipelines.
• Security and compliance concerns: Some regulated industries moved cautiously, worried that fast-paced delivery pipelines could introduce vulnerabilities or violate compliance requirements.

Regional Market Breakdown

The 2019 market research segmented the global DevOps market across five major regions:

• North America: The largest market, driven by high cloud adoption rates, a mature software industry, and early enterprise uptake of DevOps tooling and practices.
• Europe: Strong growth fueled by digital transformation programs across the UK, Germany, and the Nordic countries, alongside increasing regulatory focus on software quality and security.
• Asia-Pacific (APAC): The fastest-growing region, with rapid IT modernization in China, India, Japan, and Australia driving demand for DevOps platforms and consulting services.
• Middle East and Africa (MEA): Emerging adoption, particularly in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, tied to government-led digital economy initiatives.
• South America (SAM): Gradual growth, led by Brazil and other markets investing in cloud infrastructure and software modernization.

Business Opportunities in the DevOps Ecosystem

The projected market growth created distinct opportunity areas across the DevOps value chain:

Tooling and Platform Vendors

Vendors offering CI/CD platforms, monitoring and observability tools, infrastructure-as-code solutions, and container orchestration platforms stood to capture significant revenue. Key commercial segments included source control, build automation, artifact management, deployment automation, and application performance monitoring.

Professional Services and Consulting

Systems integrators and boutique DevOps consultancies saw growing demand for DevOps assessments, pipeline design, toolchain implementation, and organizational coaching. Enterprises lacking internal expertise frequently outsourced initial DevOps transformation programs.

Training and Certification

The skills gap created a substantial market for DevOps training providers, bootcamps, and certification bodies. Certifications around Kubernetes (CKA, CKAD), AWS DevOps, Azure DevOps, and general DevOps methodologies grew rapidly in demand from 2018 onward.

Managed DevOps and DevOps-as-a-Service

Cloud providers and managed service providers began offering fully managed CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure provisioning, and monitoring stacks, enabling smaller organizations to adopt DevOps practices without building large internal platform engineering teams.

Competitive Landscape

The DevOps market in 2019 was characterized by a mix of large platform vendors, open-source ecosystems, and specialist tool providers. Major players across the toolchain included companies operating in version control, CI/CD, monitoring, cloud infrastructure, and security scanning. Competition was intense, with cloud hyperscalers increasingly bundling DevOps tooling into their broader platform offerings, squeezing standalone vendors on pricing while expanding total market volume.

PEST Factors Shaping the Market

Market analysts applied PEST (Political, Economic, Social, Technological) analysis to all five regional markets:

• Political: Data sovereignty regulations and government cloud policies influenced how DevOps toolchains could be deployed in regulated sectors and geographies.
• Economic: Favorable economic conditions in 2018–2019 supported IT budget growth, though organizations in cost-sensitive markets prioritized open-source DevOps tooling over commercial alternatives.
• Social: A cultural shift toward engineering-led organizations and agile working practices expanded the internal audience for DevOps adoption beyond IT departments.
• Technological: Advances in AI/ML, containerization, serverless computing, and GitOps were identified as technologies likely to reshape DevOps toolchains over the forecast period.

Looking Back: How the Market Actually Evolved

This report was published in 2019 with a forecast horizon through 2026. Since then, several developments have validated the growth thesis: Kubernetes became the de facto container orchestration standard, GitOps emerged as a dominant deployment pattern, platform engineering teams became a recognized organizational construct, and DevSecOps integration accelerated — particularly in regulated industries. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 also acted as an unexpected accelerant for cloud adoption and DevOps tooling spend, as organizations rushed to support distributed engineering teams.

For current market sizing and forecasts, consult up-to-date reports from recognized market research firms, as the 2019 figures and projections cited here are now historical data points rather than actionable planning figures.