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.

A recent research study on the global GDPR Services market presented by Zeal Insider offers a detailed analysis of key market players, market revenue, market segments, share, and geographic regions. It also offers several industry trends and predictions for upcoming Eight years. The report also puts light on the current COVID-19 pandemic situations on the Global GDPR Services Market enabling the user to propose strategic growth plans and tactical business judgments. The size of global GDPR Services market is estimated to grow during the forecast period of 2020 to 2028 with a CAGR of xx% and is estimated to reach.US$ xx million by 2028, from US$ xx million in 2020.

COVID-19 Impact

The report explains the degree of COVID-19 impact on every segment under the scope of the report with its trend over the forecast period. COVID-19 pandemic situations have led to a significant slowing down in the production and manufacturing of various sectors. Strict lockdowns imposed by several governments have led to a temporary shutdown of small as well as major market players. The report study offers a useful insight that explains the impact of government policies, import & export control, disruption of the supply chain, distribution network, and halts on production activities on overall revenue generation. Also, it helps clients to make strategic decisions to overcome these pandemic conditions.

Manufacturers Information

The GDPR Services report focuses on the major players operating in the global GDPR Services market to study their market share, net sale, business strategies, top competitors, key business segments, and regional presence. The competitive landscape presented in the report will help clients to focus on the key parameters that will help them to achieve desired targets in the global GDPR Services market.

Leading companies reviewed in the GDPR Services Market‎ report are:

IBM
Veritas
AWS
Microsoft
Micro Focus
Oracle
SAP
Capgemini
Absolute Software
Proofpoint
Mimecast
Varonis
SAS Institute
Symantec
Trustwave
Trustarc
Protegrity
Talend
Informatica
Onetrust
DXC Technology
Segmentation

A research study offers a systematic estimation of the global market, comprising key growth trends and significant opportunities based on its segments which provides insights to draw effective strategies for business growth. The report bifurcates the global GDPR Services market by studying various factors into respective segments and their sub-segments. Further, the report comprises various existing, previous, and future growth trends for all segments and sub-segments for the forecast period 2020-2028. The study of segmentation outlined accurate calculations and predictions in terms of revenue and volume.

By the product type, the market is primarily split into:

Data Discovery and Mapping
Data Governance
API Management
By the end-users/application, this report covers the following segments:

GDPR Readiness Assessment
Risk Assessment and DPIA
DPO-as-a-Service
Regional Information

The regional analysis offered in the report will help clients to categorize significant opportunities of the global GDPR Services market presented in different regions and countries. The GDPR Services market is segmented based on various regions such as:

North America
Europe
Asia Pacific
Latin America
Middle East and Africa
Who will get benefit of this report?

Investors and Private Equity Firms
GDPR Services Market Providers
Suppliers and Distributors
Government and Regulatory Agencies
End users
Why should buy this report?

Provides in depth research analysis of the overall GDPR Services market. which can help save time for start-up businesses related to the GDPR Services Market.
The GDPR Services markets latest news, forecast analysis as well as the key competitors of the market are easily available with all the necessary information.
The GDPR Services report comprises of graphs, pie charts and other representations that can help the reader understand the information at a glance.
Through the GDPR Services report the manufacturers can understand the consumer behaviour, business segments as well as sell products-based information provided.
COVID-19 impact on the market and industry as well as the recovery analysis.

Report Methodology

The GDPR Services report has designed by taking in to consideration of latest trends and opportunities, potential threats, and key driving factors, as well as key revenue pockets. The study has been concluded based on thorough secondary research after studying several industry publications, government reports, company news and press releases. All these studies are backed with detailed primary studies which combinedly draw a revenue outlook for the GDPR Services market.

We at Zeal Insider aim to be global leaders in qualitative and predictive analysis as we put ourselves in the front seat for identifying worldwide industrial trends and opportunities and mapping them out for you on a silver platter. We specialize in identifying the calibers of the market’s robust activities and constantly pushing out the areas which allow our clientele base in making the most innovative, optimized, integrated and strategic business decisions in order to put them ahead of their competition by leaps and bounds.

After a year of full-time remote work, software engineers and team leaders are perfecting daily work routines developed in this solitary setting and simultaneously looking ahead to what the future will bring. Managers say that building new communication habits was key to making the shift to remote work. Development teams had to make adjustments to daily work flows as well, all while working longer hours and dealing with an increased risk of burnout as a result.

Jacqui Vreeland, recruiting manager at Emergent Software, noticed that the pandemic forced many developers to think about the long-term stability of their job.

“Too many people were working in a way that was, frankly, unsustainable before and when the world switched to being fully remote, many people have had to reevaluate what they truly love about their job in the first place when so many in-person benefits have been stripped away,” she said.

Meanwhile, for recruiters and hiring managers, filling open positions is as challenging as ever, even when the candidate pool now reaches worldwide.

Here’s a look at how the job landscape, daily routines and communication skills have changed over the last 12 months as well as what the future may look like.

How the pandemic has changed the job market
David Moise, president of Decide Consulting, is a software developer who now runs an IT staffing and recruiting firm. He said he noticed that managers, directors and vice presidents in IT were let go at a higher rate than other roles while hands-on engineers were not. He said some companies expected the developer to suddenly do their job plus the former manager’s job while other companies realized that the extra load had to be dispersed among everyone.

Moise said that letting go of managers meant that making decisions about digital transformation strategies was that much harder. Many companies threw out the old technology roadmap to adapt to the demands of the pandemic, but in some cases there were no managers to make decisions about software and tech stacks, he said.

Moise said that hiring is harder now in part because required skill sets are longer and more specific.

“Just a couple of years ago if you are looking for a developer, you had 20 options on skills and you needed to match 10,” he said. “Now you have 75 and you need to match 25.”

Mary Lee Olson, head of talent at Rollbar, said that companies should expand their hiring scope to the entire world.

“Expanding your geographical reach to find talent presents its own, new challenges but it’s a pivot companies must make,” she said.

Rollbar helps fix critical errors by using real-time alerts and AI-assisted workflows.

Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker, CEO of software consultancy company Six Feet Up, said hiring has become somewhat easier thanks to a truly global job market. She has employees in 15 time zones. One disadvantage is that such a large pool puts stress on compensation packages as smaller developer teams compete in a global marketplace, creating discrepancies based on company size, reputation and location.

“Over time, I expect compensation differences to level out, but for now, it’s common to see candidates asking for up to 3 times what you are expecting to pay for a technical position,” she said.

Adjusting the daily routine
For some development teams, the overnight shift to 100% remote work was a catalyst for improvements. Jay Leaf-Clark, head of IT at Dashlane, said the shift to remote work forced his company to change support and maintenance models within IT.

“We’ve rapidly adapted to an already incoming, and frankly, welcomed new way of managing IT that has up until now, been slowed in most organizations due to the battle between IT leaders and leadership on allocating the budget and time to make these dreams a reality,” he said.

Leaf-Clark said that this transformation will have long-term benefits as this new display of agility proves that his department can handle whatever the future has in store.

Alberto Giorgi, director of engineering at Tray.io, a low-code workflow automation company, said that remote work inspired his team to take a new look at internal processes from prioritizing asynchronous and written communication, ensuring a strong meeting etiquette to finding new ways to collaborate more effectively and increase the team’s overall productivity.

Giorgi said that demand for proper IT support for DevOps practitioners in particular increased significantly in the early days of the pandemic as companies faced a growing backlog in their deployment and development processes.

Another challenge was that the spike in Zoom meetings meant that developers lost time that would have been dedicated to writing code, which reduced overall efficiency, he said.

“To combat these challenges, many development teams took to the dual strategy of using API integrations and workflow automation to increase productivity,” he said.

The key to this approach is making sure that tools for important use cases such as source code control, continuous integration and delivery, and issue tracking can seamlessly pass data to each other.

“To streamline processes, smart devops teams looked to API integrations to connect their tech stack to avoid having to copy and re-copy issue logs and other data across multiple platforms,” he said.

Giorgi said automation has allowed his team to focus more resources on strategic projects while streamlining away time-consuming manual work.

Building new communication habits
Many workers miss the spontaneous chats in the breakroom or taking lunch with colleagues. For developers, not being able to walk over to a colleague’s cube to ask a question was a more serious problem. Alex Yelenevych, co-founder and chief marketing and product officer at CodeGym, an online platform for learning Java, said that developers had to adjust to the lack of in-person communication.

“Sometimes teammates didn’t understand some tasks in writing without further explanation, even a video call didn’t help,” he said. “We just started to formulate our tasks more precisely.”

Hendryx-Parker of Six Feet Up said that the pandemic has made internal communication critical.

“Having to deal with isolation made it all the more obvious that soft skills are actually essential in development to keep high performing teams going,” she said.

Yelenevych said that as people started to work longer hours, professional burnout began to manifest itself much earlier and deeper.

Hendryx-Parker said that by the fall, she saw developer burnout due to lopsided work/life balance.

“Working at home was especially challenging for developers with children, as they were putting longer hours while at the same time acting as educators and caretakers,” she said.

Yelenevych sees a hybrid schedule with some days at home and some days at the office as the optimal approach.

The idea of continuously delivered, quality software vetted through a collaborative and highly automated series of steps from inception to deployment is an enticing one, hence the appeal of DevOps. However, while just about everyone says they are pursuing DevOps, the reality on the ground has been mixed at best.

The urgency of DevOps has only increased over the past year, as the Covid crisis scattered corporate workforces and physically separated IT teams. “We need to rethink connection and integrations, both on a technical level and a human one,” says Ed Macosky, head of product at Boomi .”While it may seem that many DevOps teams don’t have any trouble working remotely, two out of five said that remote work is affecting their ability to innovate and be creative, with the majority noting this is due to a lack of in-person connection with colleagues. DevOps teams bring innovations to life at a company.”

However, it’s been difficult to organize and maintain DevOps teams, especially at this time of uncertainty. “With employee churn, DevOps teams are often left to deal with a script-based dumpster fire,” warns Ashish Kakran, principal with Thomvest Ventures. For instance, while DevOps is supposed to put development and operations on the same page, the two groups often are still taking their own separate paths. “We’re seeing DevOps implemented separately and differently in different functional areas of the same organization,” says Brian Dawson, DevOps evangelist with CloudBees. “Operations may implement their own DevOps tools and processes, while application development implements their own DevOps tools and processes.”

So while the perception on the ground is everybody is doing DevOps, “the reality is also that we still have work to do it right, do it at scale and achieve universal maturity,” Dawson adds. “DevOps is about connecting development and operations. The challenge is to build those connections, universally, between leaders and practitioners, Dev and Ops.”

Cultural issues create this disjointed relationship between Dev and Ops. “Culture is the number one missing component, but there is also a failure to truly connect and automate across functional silos,” Dawson says. “This results in lack of shared visibility, consistent feedback to drive improvement and, potentially, a negative experience which inhibits adoption.”

There are too many tools competing for Dev and Ops teams’ mindshare as well. “A single team may have anywhere between 20 to 50 tools,” says Kakran. “Separating signal-from-noise when you are bombarded by hundreds of alerts per hour is quite challenging.”

The continuous delivery piece is also a snag in the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) that should flow effortless through DevOps. “Enterprises are lagging in test automation and are increasing efforts to automate continuous testing, which is a core component of CD,” says Venky Chennapragada, DevOps architect with Capgemini North America.. “Some enterprises are unable to adopt a high level of CI/CD because their application portfolio mostly consists of packaged software, legacy software or ERP systems.”

Security is another issue that slows down DevOps practices. “The modern DevOps environment is full of creative people who are encouraged to build fast and hard to hit innovation targets,” says Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs. “The problem is, security teams only step in at the end of the CI/CD pipeline and point out vulnerabilities. Often this is after code has been committed, and sometimes even after the developer has moved on to another build.” As a result of the too-late entry of security-minded teams, “this causes friction and destroys productivity as it means resources are pulled back.”

What’s being missed with DevOps efforts, Chennapragada adds, is strong governance. This “is leading to multiple versions of implementations and pipelines.” These workflows, he continues, “should be built based on patterns so they are easy to replicate, leading to better maintenance and support that can be executed by DevOps engineers.”

What can be done to make DevOps more cohesive and transformative? Industry thinkers provide some suggestions to get things on track:

Move more responsibility to developers. Yes, DevOps is not always a 50/50 proposition. Kakran calls for an acceleration of the “Shift-Left” phenomenon, which puts more responsibility for the process in the hands of developers. “In this world, dev tools filling the ‘X-as-Code’ category will have an outsized impact on an organization’s ability to deliver faster, more frequently and with fewer number of failed deployments,” he says. “The ‘X’ here is a critical application component – infrastructure, security, compliance, and others. This combination of more empowered developers and more efficient DevOps tools will dramatically accelerate software delivery even more than the past.”
Promote more DevOps training, education and awareness. “DevOps and security teams need to reduce tension through skills development,” says Breen. “By imbuing engineers with an understanding of the baseline tenets of security, and gradually helping them understand the more technical nuances, they will begin to develop more secure code as part of their daily work. This reduces friction, stops code being recalled and helps innovation flourish.”
Tie DevOps to the ultimate customer. “We see more success in enterprises where there is a DevOps champion at the CX level who can remove obstacles due to culture, process, or tool issues when they arise,” Chennapragada says.
Watch the market for more integrated solutions. “End-to-end integrated DevOps platforms will become a norm,” says Kakran. “Such platforms will offer a few best-in-class components with built-in automation and will enable organizations to integrate other DevOps tools in a plug and play manner. Mergers and acquisitions will accelerate in 2021 with bigger companies rushing to acquire smaller companies who have the best-in-class tools which would help them provide an integrated solution.” As a result, he says, “CIOs will be able to dramatically improve their teams’ productivity by leaving integration and maintenance hassle of CI/CD pipelines to integrated platforms. The trend of internal teams writing scripts or generating tickets will be replaced by automation provided by integrated tools from third party vendors will accelerate in a big way in 2021.”
Communicate more. “It’s key that DevOps has the tools and resources to continue creating and integrating quickly at their disposal,” says Macosky. “It boils down to improved communications and leveraging time saving tools like low-code. New ideas can emerge when we’re connected. Then we can solve more problems and teams can prevail, regardless of the situation.”
Ultimately, in the months and years ahead, “the adoption of cloud-native, container-based microservice architectures necessitates the adoption of DevOps culture and tools, says Kakran. “Newer applications are entirely being built using containers and Kubernetes and hosted in a hybrid-cloud environment. This is true even for the largest financial institutions that have historically been hesitant to adopt cloud. Lift-and-shift of legacy applications is a harder problem to solve but serious efforts are underway even there because the benefits of cloud outweigh the cost of adoption. 2021 will be the year of prominence for the 50 million software developers around the world delivering software with very high velocity with higher quality than ever before.”

The urgency of DevOps has only increased over the past year, as the Covid crisis scattered corporate workforces and physically separated IT teams. “We need to rethink connection and integrations, both on a technical level and a human one,” says Ed Macosky, head of product at Boomi .”While it may seem that many DevOps teams don’t have any trouble working remotely, two out of five said that remote work is affecting their ability to innovate and be creative, with the majority noting this is due to a lack of in-person connection with colleagues. DevOps teams bring innovations to life at a company.”

However, it’s been difficult to organize and maintain DevOps teams, especially at this time of uncertainty. “With employee churn, DevOps teams are often left to deal with a script-based dumpster fire,” warns Ashish Kakran, principal with Thomvest Ventures. For instance, while DevOps is supposed to put development and operations on the same page, the two groups often are still taking their own separate paths. “We’re seeing DevOps implemented separately and differently in different functional areas of the same organization,” says Brian Dawson, DevOps evangelist with CloudBees. “Operations may implement their own DevOps tools and processes, while application development implements their own DevOps tools and processes.”

So while the perception on the ground is everybody is doing DevOps, “the reality is also that we still have work to do it right, do it at scale and achieve universal maturity,” Dawson adds. “DevOps is about connecting development and operations. The challenge is to build those connections, universally, between leaders and practitioners, Dev and Ops.”

Cultural issues create this disjointed relationship between Dev and Ops. “Culture is the number one missing component, but there is also a failure to truly connect and automate across functional silos,” Dawson says. “This results in lack of shared visibility, consistent feedback to drive improvement and, potentially, a negative experience which inhibits adoption.”

There are too many tools competing for Dev and Ops teams’ mindshare as well. “A single team may have anywhere between 20 to 50 tools,” says Kakran. “Separating signal-from-noise when you are bombarded by hundreds of alerts per hour is quite challenging.”

The continuous delivery piece is also a snag in the continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) that should flow effortless through DevOps. “Enterprises are lagging in test automation and are increasing efforts to automate continuous testing, which is a core component of CD,” says Venky Chennapragada, DevOps architect with Capgemini North America.. “Some enterprises are unable to adopt a high level of CI/CD because their application portfolio mostly consists of packaged software, legacy software or ERP systems.”

Security is another issue that slows down DevOps practices. “The modern DevOps environment is full of creative people who are encouraged to build fast and hard to hit innovation targets,” says Kevin Breen, director of cyber threat research at Immersive Labs. “The problem is, security teams only step in at the end of the CI/CD pipeline and point out vulnerabilities. Often this is after code has been committed, and sometimes even after the developer has moved on to another build.” As a result of the too-late entry of security-minded teams, “this causes friction and destroys productivity as it means resources are pulled back.”

What’s being missed with DevOps efforts, Chennapragada adds, is strong governance. This “is leading to multiple versions of implementations and pipelines.” These workflows, he continues, “should be built based on patterns so they are easy to replicate, leading to better maintenance and support that can be executed by DevOps engineers.”

What can be done to make DevOps more cohesive and transformative? Industry thinkers provide some suggestions to get things on track:

Move more responsibility to developers. Yes, DevOps is not always a 50/50 proposition. Kakran calls for an acceleration of the “Shift-Left” phenomenon, which puts more responsibility for the process in the hands of developers. “In this world, dev tools filling the ‘X-as-Code’ category will have an outsized impact on an organization’s ability to deliver faster, more frequently and with fewer number of failed deployments,” he says. “The ‘X’ here is a critical application component – infrastructure, security, compliance, and others. This combination of more empowered developers and more efficient DevOps tools will dramatically accelerate software delivery even more than the past.”
Promote more DevOps training, education and awareness. “DevOps and security teams need to reduce tension through skills development,” says Breen. “By imbuing engineers with an understanding of the baseline tenets of security, and gradually helping them understand the more technical nuances, they will begin to develop more secure code as part of their daily work. This reduces friction, stops code being recalled and helps innovation flourish.”
Tie DevOps to the ultimate customer. “We see more success in enterprises where there is a DevOps champion at the CX level who can remove obstacles due to culture, process, or tool issues when they arise,” Chennapragada says.
Watch the market for more integrated solutions. “End-to-end integrated DevOps platforms will become a norm,” says Kakran. “Such platforms will offer a few best-in-class components with built-in automation and will enable organizations to integrate other DevOps tools in a plug and play manner. Mergers and acquisitions will accelerate in 2021 with bigger companies rushing to acquire smaller companies who have the best-in-class tools which would help them provide an integrated solution.” As a result, he says, “CIOs will be able to dramatically improve their teams’ productivity by leaving integration and maintenance hassle of CI/CD pipelines to integrated platforms. The trend of internal teams writing scripts or generating tickets will be replaced by automation provided by integrated tools from third party vendors will accelerate in a big way in 2021.”
Communicate more. “It’s key that DevOps has the tools and resources to continue creating and integrating quickly at their disposal,” says Macosky. “It boils down to improved communications and leveraging time saving tools like low-code. New ideas can emerge when we’re connected. Then we can solve more problems and teams can prevail, regardless of the situation.”
Ultimately, in the months and years ahead, “the adoption of cloud-native, container-based microservice architectures necessitates the adoption of DevOps culture and tools, says Kakran. “Newer applications are entirely being built using containers and Kubernetes and hosted in a hybrid-cloud environment. This is true even for the largest financial institutions that have historically been hesitant to adopt cloud. Lift-and-shift of legacy applications is a harder problem to solve but serious efforts are underway even there because the benefits of cloud outweigh the cost of adoption. 2021 will be the year of prominence for the 50 million software developers around the world delivering software with very high velocity with higher quality than ever before.”

This research study focuses on the various styles, principles, applications, and major players in the Continuous Integration Tools market. It also contains a systematic review of market conditions (2014-2019), enterprise products advantages and disadvantages, company competition dynamics, regional industrial layout characteristics and macroeconomic policies, industry development patterns (2019-2024), and industrial policy. Information on the required raw materials will be scientifically researched and presented in this area to demonstrate the role of the distribution channel and product circulation to downstream customers. This market research will help you identify the target market in particular. This market study will help you identify the characteristics of the Continuous Integration Tools market and provide an overview of the industry’s growth.

COVID-19 Market Effect
In view of the COVID-19 outbreak, the Continuous Integration Tools Industry Review offers research into the supply chain, provincial government legislation, fare control, importation, and possible business consequences. It also describes venture competition, business position (2020-2026), potential market barriers, points of interest, and industry improvement trends (2020-2026), macroeconomic approaches, territorial attributes, and production data. Top-to-bottom studies on how COVID-19 will affect the Continuous Integration Tools industry with potential changes are needed for the business study.

Major Market Study Features

Market Study :
The market report analyzes the market size, trends, and forecasts for the Continuous Integration Tools Industry in the various geographies, end-use, and type segments of the nuclear medicine market; additionally, the market study presents key players, company profiles, an overview of market competition for additional accessories, and the market price in the research report.

Insights on Market Study:
The key players in the industry active in the industry are the points addressed in the market analysis, along with data on manufacturers, suppliers of raw materials, end consumers, distributors, traders, and so on. The full profiles of the companies are listed in the report. Output, capacity, price, cost, revenue, gross, sales volume, gross margin, sales income, growth rate, demand, import, supply, export, future strategies, and technological developments are all included in the market study.

Market Segments

The market report defines the industry by categorizing it into different segments based on applications, end-users, product type, and other factors. The segmentation is divided into groups based on progress, tasks, needs, and behaviors.

Segmentation : By Deployment Mode (On-premises and Cloud), By Organization Size (Small & Medium Enterprises (SMEs), Large Enterprises), By Vertical (BFSI, Telecommunications, Media & Entertainment, Retail &eCommerce, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Education)

Regional Assessment:

Concrete radiopharmaceuticals are imported, licensed, clearly used, and manufactured in the Continuous Integration Tools Industry in Southeast Asia, Japan, China, Europe, North America, and India, according to this market research. The Continuous Integration Tools Industry research provides an in-depth view of regional break-up, the region’s leading growth rate, countries with the highest market share, geographical break-up, market dynamics, future innovations, status, industry challenges, scale, regulatory policies, player strategies, and business profiles.

Competitive Evaluation:

The Continuous Integration Tools market report identifies a number of major market producers. It enables businesses to consider the strategies and alliances being developed by other industry leaders to combat market competition. The detailed business report offers a noteworthy microscopic look at the industry. Companies can detect the footprints of producers by learning about demand, the global price of producers, and the global advantage of manufacturing firms.

Market Highlights

Overall, the Global Continuous Integration Tools market explores the influence of market scale influences on market growth and development. It also provides experience in the market context of major producers, after an evaluation. This market research also looks at global negotiation networks, wholesalers, illnesses, drivers, opportunities, possible instances, market share, progress rate, contention scene, and the Continuous Integration Tools market.

QMI has the most comprehensive collection of market research products and services available on the web. We deliver reports from virtually all major publications and refresh our list regularly to provide you with immediate online access to the world’s most extensive and up-to-date archive of professional insights into global markets, companies, goods, and patterns.

Kudos to the knowledge know-how neighborhood over the previous 12 months, who helped preserve the connectivity and communications that held organizations collectively throughout the nice company dispersal. Not solely have been many organizations capable of keep on and even thrive, however the productiveness of IT departments themselves remained robust.

The productiveness and steady supply of companies by IT departments by way of the Covid disaster is due in no small half to DevOps — the aligning and syncing of developer initiative with operations cadence. The occasions of the previous 12 months have solely made DevOps extra related.

That is the phrase popping out of a survey of three,200 enterprises launched by RedGate Software program, which performs within the information house, documenting modifications in IT as a direct results of the Covid disaster. Almost three quarters of organizations, 74%, have now adopted DevOps in some type, cross-platform database use has risen markedly. “IT pondering has moved additional, sooner, and maybe extra completely than any earlier 12 months,” the survey’s authors report.

Seventy-four % of organizations within the report are actually taking a DevOps method to improvement, in comparison with 47% when the report was first revealed 5 years in the past. As well as, the survey’s authors report, a transparent correlation between DevOps adoption and software program supply efficiency has emerged, with excessive performers capable of launch each software and database modifications sooner, extra incessantly, and with fewer errors.

The good company dispersal that passed off final 12 months didn’t make a dent in IT productiveness, the survey finds. IT groups have remained productive whereas working remotely. Forty-three % state their organizations have grown above or in step with expectations, 13% have seen neither development nor a decline. Solely 9 % have seen a fall. By way of productiveness and efficiency. A majority, 80%, agree that distant working will stay in the long run, with 63% agreeing it has elevated their productiveness.

The highest obstacles to an efficient DevOps effort embody an absence of applicable expertise within the crew, disruption to present workflows/enterprise, and an absence of alignment between improvement and operations groups.

In relation to bettering software program supply and operational efficiency, metrics corresponding to deployment frequency, lead time for modifications, time to revive service, and alter failure charges, there are two major challenges, the survey exhibits. The survey exhibits an absence of automation in launch processes (41%) and disadvantages with legacy software code (39%) are the main inhibitors to delivering on efficiency. “These two components seem to go hand in hand, with the introduction of automation to established, advanced environments being harder,” the survey’s authors level out. “General, the challenges chosen by greater than a 3rd of respondents are round technical obstacles and useful resource constraints.”

Curiously, lack of finances shouldn’t be seen as a extensively unfold problem to bettering software program supply, with just one in 5 respondents deciding on it, the survey exhibits. Cultural resistance was additionally reported by solely 15% of respondents.

The survey additionally delved right into a associated development, database DevOps adoption. “Utility builders can iterate and ship options at a a lot sooner price,” they state. “Nonetheless, the enterprise can not understand that worth until database modifications are deployed on the identical price, which implies Database DevOps practices must be adopted to allow fast enterprise worth supply.”

Fueling this requirement is the rising variety of knowledge environments. Nobody makes use of simply Oracle or SQL Server and and nothing else. There are open-source and web-friendly databases corresponding to MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, MariaDB and CouchBase, to call just a few. Greater than 47% of the survey respondents indicated that they’ve NoSQL databases of their enterprise, the survey confirms. Solely 30% of organizations are actually utilizing one database platform in comparison with 38% only one 12 months in the past, the survey exhibits. Twenty-six % have two databases, and practically half of respondents use three or extra databases.

One of the most revolutionary technologies developed after the internet is cloud computing. Without the introduction of cloud computing, the internet wouldn’t be the same, our computing needs would be different, and several tech giants wouldn’t be where they are today. The dependency on cloud services enabled faster access to resources, made our lives simpler, and carved a way for further technological advancements. According to LinkedIn Global Skillset Survey, cloud computing is the most important skill set that companies are seeking.

Whether big or small, every business is leveraging cloud resources to build their digital presence and remain alive during Covid. The havoc wreaked by Covid-19 has caused companies to understand the long-term benefits of cloud service, other than just remotely managing the workforce. According to Research and Markets study, the global cloud computing industry is expected to grow from $371.4 billion in 2020 to $832.1 billion by 2026, at a 17.5 per cent CAGR. This number is sufficient to explain the drastic transformation cloud computing is about to bring across industries. No wonder, it is one of the few recession-proof careers today.

As a domain, cloud computing has a lot to offer in terms of business scalability as well as high-paying employment opportunities to skilled learners. According to PayScale, a fresher with cloud computing skills and an AWS certification annually earns an average of ₹5 to ₹7 lakh, and with over five years of experience, they earn an annual average of ₹12 lakh in India. This number keeps increasing with the years of experience and a more in-depth understanding of the industry.

However, one of the major concerns learners face in their initial stage of upskilling is selecting the resource that would be best for them. According to several experts, some of the key skills that companies nowadays seek in a cloud professional are cloud migration and deployment within a multi-cloud ecosystem, database skills, programming skills and DevOps.

Let’s take a look at some of the most popular cloud computing job roles in the market today:

Cloud engineer

With more businesses turning towards cloud services, there is a high demand for technical professionals with sound knowledge of cloud who can help enterprises design, plan, deploy, implement, and maintain cloud-associated projects. To become a cloud engineer, learners need to develop core skills in programming, database management, operating system, and development operations.

Cloud architect

Just like an architect builds physical infrastructure, cloud architects do the same in the cloud environment. They are responsible for designing and building a strong, agile and robust cloud infrastructure that works effectively for a business’s day-to-day functioning.

Cloud administrator

Cloud administrator is basically a cloud expert, with sound practical experience in the cloud ecosystem. They are responsible for system management, troubleshooting within multiple cloud ecosystems, as well as virtualisation. The cloud administrator job role requires expert-level knowledge of concepts such as operating system, configuration management, monitoring the cloud environment and scripting languages.

Cloud security specialist

Security is one of the major concerns businesses and individuals are trying to tackle. Not every business can afford to build their own cloud infrastructure, so they rely on cloud service providers to fulfil their cloud computing requirements. Using a cloud service is not very different from leasing a car, which means that businesses do not have much control over the cloud services they are using. However, it is also their responsibility to keep the data secure. They require cloud security experts who can keep the cloud repository safe, keep track of changes made on the cloud configuration from the service provider, and other cloud security related operations.

The cloud computing domain has ample opportunities for fresh graduates and working professionals. The minimum academic requirement to enrol in a cloud computing certification is a graduation degree with at least 50 per cent marks. Not only does a job in cloud computing come with high remuneration, but the domain is also going to take some giant leaps in the future.

As demand for digital services skyrockets, the three largest public cloud vendors in the world have effectively taken over the hyperscale data center market, according to new data from Synergy Research Group.

Amazon, Microsoft and Google collectively now account for more than 50 percent of the world’s largest data centers across the globe as the three companies continue to spend billions each year on building and expanding their global data center footprint to accommodate the high demand for cloud services. The global COVID-19 pandemic spurred a record-breaking third quarter 2020 as data center spending reached $37 billion, led by AWS, Google and Microsoft.

The number of large data centers operated by hyperscale providers like AWS, Microsoft and Google increased to nearly 600 by the end of 2020, twice as many as there were in 2015. Amazon and Google opened the most new data centers in the past 12 months, accounting for half of the total amount of new hyperscale data centers opened in 2020.
There were 111 new hyperscale data centers opened in the last eight quarters, with 52 of those coming onstream in 2020 despite COVID-19 causing a few logistical issues,” said John Dinsdale, a Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group in a statement. “That is testament to the ongoing robust growth in the digital services that are driving those investments – particularly cloud computing, SaaS, e-commerce, gaming and video services.”
The global COVID-19 pandemic has significantly shifted how businesses and organizations of all sizes buy and use online tools, from video-conferencing and virtual business events to entertainment and remote education. This change was enabled by cloud environments, particularly public clouds.
Businesses are gobbling up server, storage and networking products for their public cloud infrastructure at a rapid pace.

Spending on public cloud infrastructure reached a massive $13.3 billion in the third quarter of 2020 alone, representing an increase of 13 percent year over year, according to IT research firm IDC. Dell Technologies, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Inspur are leading the market in terms of cloud infrastructure sales as the companies lead the server, storage and hyperconverged infrastructure markets.

“In addition to almost 600 operational data centers, we have visibility of a further 219 that are at various stages of planning or building, which is good news indeed for data center hardware vendors and wholesale data center operators,” said Synergy’s Dinsdale.

Compared to traditional data centers, hyperscale data centers contain much more IT products, typically housing tens of thousands of servers and hardware alongside millions of virtual machines. Hyperscale data centers focus on infrastructure optimization and scale acceleration in their designs and how products are powered and managed.

It is key to note that companies like AWS, Google and Microsoft don’t build every single data center by themselves, typically leasing capacity and space from data center operations like Digital Realty and Equinix. Synergy said that approximately 70 percent of all hyperscale data centers are located in facilities that are leased from data center operators or are owned by partners of the hyperscale operators.

In terms of geography, the U.S. accounts for almost 40 percent of the major cloud and internet data center sites. The next most popular regions are China, Japan, Germany, the U.K. and Australia, which collectively account for another 29 percent of the total, according to Synergy.

That this year has been an interesting one for us in IT is an understatement. It’s been a very good year for public cloud though, with record growth in AWS and Azure. And for many businesses, the “digital transformation” journey towards the cloud has been highly accelerated. Maybe last year’s small proof-of-concept Azure deployments have grown into full-scale production resources. Or the inability to access your co-lo datacenter servers due to COVID-19 restrictions has forced a migration of VMs to public cloud.

Whatever the reason, you may find yourself responsible for a lot more cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) resources and now taking stock of the security posture of all of it.

This article will look at the comprehensive guidance Microsoft offers for “how to do security” in Azure and how to use the tool that brings it all together: Azure Security Center (ASC).

Cloud Adoption Framework

The CAF is a good place to start, at any stage in your cloud journey, particularly for larger businesses. Based on cloud adoption best practices from Microsoft, partners and customers, it has guidance and tools to shape technology, people and processes for cloud success. It covers strategy and planning, migration, governing, management, organization and innovation. Here we’re going to focus on the security strategy, part which covers conceptS such as securing your cloud resources as well as using cloud technology to transform how you do security, along with the shared responsibility model.

Moving to the cloud means that some parts of security (physical hosts/network/datacenters) are now the responsibility of the provider, whereas other parts stay with you (data, endpoint devices, accounts and identities). Further, with IaaS you still have to secure the OS and applications in your VMs, apply network controls and manage your identity directory (Azure Active Directory — AAD). Using PaaS services shifts some of these responsibilities to the cloud provider, depending on the service you’re using. This is one reason that you should look to modernize your applications away from IaaS towards PaaS as there’s less for you to secure, but new features to understand to ensure a good security resilience.

The CAF also covers different admin security roles involved in managing cyberrisk and how they change when you’re in the cloud. More direct guidance is also on offer through a set of recommendations and a reference implementation.
The Well-Architected Framework, on the other hand, is a set of assessments building on these five pillars:

Cost Optimization
Operational Excellence
Performance Efficiency
Reliability
Security
The assessments ascertain where you’re at today, and then spits out a set of curated guidance to improve your approach.

The rise of COVID-19 defined 2020 for nearly every industry. Cloud computing is no exception, though growth in the sector continued this year. Gartner estimates that $257.9 billion will be spent on public cloud services in 2020, up 6.3% from 2019. IDC reports that almost half of IT spending is cloud-based, “reaching 60% of all IT infrastructure and 60% to 70% of all software, services and technology spending in 2020.” These projections came in mid-2020, which proves that cloud adoption and spending were not greatly impacted by the pandemic.

You can make the argument that cloud computing itself is the trend of 2020. Blockchain, quantum computing, machine learning and AI all deservedly earn a lot of headlines in the tech press. But at a more basic level, cloud computing is changing the way we do business. Whether it is the way they store their data, improvements to agility and go-to-market for faster release of new products and services, or how they develop and operate services remotely in today’s “locked-down world,” cloud computing is benefitting all businesses in every sector.

In short, cloud computing had a strong year in 2020 despite COVID-19 and appears to have a very bright future. Several key trends, perhaps overshadowed by the pandemic, helped define a dynamic year for the sector. These include the following:

Continued Dominance of ‘The Big Four’ – All of the big four cloud providers—AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud—reported strong growth and collectively grew 40% in Q320. Together they still account for 63% of the entire cloud sector.
Rise of Managed Services – The global cloud managed services market, in particular, is growing rapidly and is expected to reach $116 billion by 2026, growing from $62.4 billion in 2020, according to a study conducted by Markets and Markets.
Serverless and Containers – There used to be some talk about serverless and containers replacing the use of traditional virtual machines (VM). But I mostly see customers realizing that VM infrastructure is not going to disappear anytime soon, though container use certainly rose over the last 12 months.
Automation – The push toward greater automation continued in 2020. I noticed users accepting greater automation in their infrastructure environments, and there was simply more demand for it across the board. This is great news as one of the major advantages of a DevOps approach is automating away the manual tasks that bog down critical projects.
Growth in home use – This may seem an obvious one, but with the COVID-19 pandemic leading companies across the globe to new “work from home” policies, virtual desk infrastructure (VDI) usage exploded.
Security – Especially with a remote workforce, cloud security faced new challenges this year. One example of this playing out is in Snowflake’s massive IPO.
Other trends of note this year included the continued growth of hybrid and multi-cloud and desktop as a service (DaaS). So, while COVID-19 truly defined 2020 for most people, the cloud sector was busy with the trends discussed above. It will certainly be interesting to see how these trends play out in the year ahead. Whatever new trends arise, it seems likely that cloud computing will continue to transform the way we all do business.

Technologists might do any number of things with their spare time, but as GitHub’s latest State of the Octoverse report makes clear, many of them choose to spend their nights and weekends working on open-source projects.

GitHub’s administrators, having analyzed millions of repositories for the report, suggest that enterprise-related developer activity drops on weekends and holidays (just as you’d expect), replaced by a surge of activity related to open-source development. Of course, GitHub suggests that employers encourage their developers’ urge to contribute to whatever projects they might find interesting: “Organizations should examine policies around external work and technology to ensure they allow time to engage with learning programs and that moonlighting policies allow for external projects.”

With technologists stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, engagement with open source has increased—GitHub notes that open-source project creation has risen by 25 percent since April (year over year). For technologists, starting and participating in open-source projects confers another benefit: The chance to collaborate and make connections with others who share similar interests. Building out your network is an invaluable part of growing your career (and perhaps finding your next gig), and contributing to repositories allows you to do that even if you’re stuck at home.

After the pandemic ends, GitHub assumes that “remote and hybrid environments are likely to be the norm” as teams return to the office. It asks employers to provide “flexible solutions” so that developers can create schedules that make work sustainable; if the long months of remote work have taught the tech industry anything, it’s that workloads and schedules can quickly expand unless there’s a conscious, concerted effort to balance out work and life.

Or as the Octoverse report puts it: “Our analysis on work timing and work volume shows that developers benefit from flexibility that allows them to do their work by spreading it out. “

As we close in on 2021, and you consider updating your résumé and other materials for the new year (whether or not you’re actually looking for a new opportunity), highlighting your participation in open-source projects can boost your appeal to employers. Not only does contributing to projects show that you have the technical chops necessary for whatever position you want; it also highlights how your passion for technology extends beyond the workplace. When a developer uses their free time to contribute to a project they feel passionate about, they’re not just having fun—they’re also boosting their career.

As we’re all focused on the current rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine, a technology known as thin-film freezing is getting a lot of attention. It’s groundbreaking and could change the way we administer drugs or use medicine in general.

You’ve probably heard about the need to keep the COVID-19 vaccine cold. It has to be so cold, in fact, that the shipment and transport are challenging.

Well, what if that vaccine could be turned into powder?

“What we’ve most recently been working on is the elimination of cold chain by storing as a powder, a dry powder where the drug is much more stable than if it was stored as a liquid or as a frozen liquid,” said co-inventor Dr. Robert Williams.

Williams said it would eliminate the need for extreme cold storage and transport. The technology isn’t new. He got a research grant and came up with it about 15 years ago.

Williams, who is also a pharmacy professor at the University of Texas in Austin, said they were working on the technology and its multiple uses when the pandemic hit.

And all of a sudden, they got a lot of attention.

“We have published over 70 papers on the technology and using it for different products- it’s quite a mature process,” Williams said. “We developed it because with other vaccines, the majority of the vaccine cost is in wastage because of this cold chain issue, so we published several key papers where we showed our thin-film freezing technology would protect vaccines – and you wouldn’t need cold chain storage.”

Glenn Mattes, President, and CEO of TFF Pharmaceuticals added that the powders can be converted to topical preparations and they are currently working with the US Army to take some of the preparations and would then administer them directly through the eye.

TFF is launching thin-film freezing into development through the FDA process.

“I use the term ubiquitous because it is and disruptive because it is,” Mattes said. He added that they’ve explored their technology in the cannabinoid realm.

But, as for the COVID vaccine, they’re aiming for a second-generation usage.

“To truly eradicate the pandemic, you have to have a global response,” Mattes said. “The companies we’ve been speaking to certainly recognize the broad utilization of the technology but the application to the developing world, rural area, remote areas, where you can take a powder and inhale it or take the powder and reconstitute it has tremendous potential.”

Experts say it is only just the beginning as they launch their technology into a new world.

Company CEO Ori Keren said the issue DevOps teams find most frustrating when it comes to managing software development projects is collecting the data that’s required to track the progress of any given project when much of that data already resides in the DevOps tools being employed. LinearB automates the collection and display of that data that DevOps teams previously spent hours collecting, he said.

That approach makes it easier to then identify which teams and projects need additional help in near real-time using metrics surfaced in dashboards provided by LinearB, Keren noted, adding metrics such as the tracking of cycle times also make it easier for DevOps leaders to justify those investments to business executives.

Keren said DevOps leaders also gain better insights in how DevOps teams are actually functioning in a way that makes it easier to predict and eliminate project delays, remediate high-risk code before it is included in a production environment, eliminate bottlenecks and make certain the focus of the DevOps team remains on tasks of the highest priority.

LinearB is making use of the application programming interfaces (APIs) that DevOps tools expose to gather the metadata that exists about the status of any given project. LinearB then employs machine learning algorithms to construct and correlate that data to give DevOps leaders more accurate insights into the status a project when compared to a project management application that requires data to be entered manually. Given the rate at which application development projects are now updated, much of the data in a project management application is outdated shortly after its entered.

Project managers also often spend a significant amount of time trying to encourage various members of a DevOps teams to update the data that resides in those project management applications.

At a time when many members of those DevOps teams are now working from home to combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, Keren noted that manually collecting that data has never been more problematic.

While many DevOps teams are embracing value stream management tools to optimize DevOps workflow, Keren added most of those tools do not collect data at a granular enough level to provide DevOps leaders with enough software deliver intelligence to meaningfully impact DevOps workflows in near real-time.

In general, Keren said most DevOps teams are too focused on metrics such as the number of lines of code or the number of commits being made. Metrics such as cycle times are more indicative of the productivity of a DevOps team.

It’s not clear how the ability to automatically pull metrics from DevOps tools might impact the role of project managers. In theory at least, they should be able to spend more time helping DevOps leaders identify issues proactively versus badgering DevOps teams to fill out reports.

Regardless of how the role of the project manager evolves, the one thing that is for certain is most members of a DevOps team would happily prefer to see as much of that process become automated as possible.

Cloud computing ETFs have benefitted from the historic shift to working-from-home and distance learning brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, though some providers expect the surge to continue long after the global health crisis ends.

“This has been a phenomenal year for cloud computing stocks, they have been extremely well positioned in this environment,” said Jay Jacobs, senior vice-president and head of research and strategy for Global X Management Company LLC, which first launched its Global X Cloud Computing ETF (CLOU-Q) in April 2019. The ETF has surged by about 60 per cent in the past year.

Other cloud-based ETFs such as the Wisdom Tree Cloud Computing Fund (WCLD-Q) and First Trust Cloud Computer ETF (SKYY-Q) have risen by about 80 per cent and 45 per cent, respectively, over the past year.

“The reason why we continue to remain very bullish on the space is because preferences really have changed,” Mr. Jacobs says. “Yes, we will have a vaccine that will ultimately get distributed and there will be a post-pandemic life at some point, but from what we can tell in terms of surveys and announcements from different companies, is that use cases for cloud computing are not going away.”

Now that people have incorporated these software-as-a-service platforms into their work and personal lives, Mr. Jacobs says “there is a real stickiness to it, where you don’t want to go back to your old ways of doing things.”

ETF provider Evolve Funds Group Inc. chief executive office Raj Lala agrees the pandemic has accelerated the use of cloud computing, “but it has also resulted in a long-term behavioural shift.”

Mr. Lala cites e-signature platform DocuSign Inc. as an example. “Now that people have started to use DocuSign, do you really think companies and individuals are going to go back to printing a document, signing it and sending it back? Probably not,” he says.

Providers take a wide range of approaches in selecting the individual companies to include in their cloud ETF products. Some focus more on physical cloud infrastructure such as data centres and server makers while others are more heavily weighted toward cloud-based services such as video conferencing, enterprise software and virtual private network (VPN) companies.

Evolve used to include cloud computing as a component in its Evolve Innovation Index ETF (EDGE-T), but Mr. Lala said the sector has now “run into the size where it really does merit its own fund.”

Evolve plans to launch what it calls Canada’s first cloud-computing ETF, the Evolve Cloud Computing Index Fund (DATA-T), which submitted a preliminary prospectus to securities regulators Nov. 12 and will set a date to begin trading after receiving final approval.

While Canadian investors and advisors can access the U.S.-listed [cloud computing ETFs], they will have to invest in U.S. dollars,” Mr. Lala says, “whereas with our fund you would be able to invest on a currency-hedged basis, which for a lot of people is pretty important.”

While DATA is set to be the first Canadian ETF with ‘cloud’ in its title, Nick Mersch, an associate portfolio manager at ETF provider Purpose Investments, argues Canadian investors already have multiple ways of gaining exposure to the sector using their own currency.

“There is a lot of a marketing component” behind Evolve’s claim of launching DATA as Canada’s “first” cloud computing ETF, says Mr. Mersch, who runs the Purpose Global Innovators Fund (PINV-T), a technology fund with an ETF structure that takes a broader approach. The fund is up about 40 per cent over the past year.

“Cloud and AI [artificial intelligence] and automation are our main themes, but with an enterprise software core holding, and since a lot of these applications are indeed built in the cloud there is a lot of overlap,” he says.

“You really need to have a zoom-out lens about whether it is just a specific cloud-based application, or do these software companies actually touch everything else?”

Choosing the right cloud computing ETF can be more challenging because “there is no S&P 500 of cloud computing or of battery technology or of robotics,” says Mr. Jacobs of Global X. “With all thematic ETFs, there is a lot of work that goes into the backend of designing the index [and] really scoping out what is the theme and how are we going to access it.”

Among the key differentiators is how the different cloud computing ETFs account for the elephants in the room: tech giants such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and IBM that dominate the cloud computing industry despite only earning a fraction of their overall revenues from offering cloud services.

“What we have done is specifically include exposure to those companies, but capped them so that in aggregate they [represent no more than] 10 percent of our fund,” Mr. Jacobs says of CLOU. “That is a pretty good differentiator for us because I think a lot of our competitors often include those companies at a much bigger weight.”

As cloud services become increasingly essential, some have compared investing in cloud ETFs to buying utility stocks.

“The difference with utilities though is utilities are regulated on the pricing side,” Mr. Jacobs says. “The reason why that is important is because, for cloud computing, it is really a fixed cost business, so as they add more users or increase prices it is really additive to their earnings.”

“In 2020, the Zooms of the world and the Salesforces of the world were adding clients very quickly and knew the economy was bad so they gave [lower] prices to get people into the system,” he says. “Starting in 2021, due to the fixed-cost nature of their businesses, they are going to have a lot of power to raise prices and a lot of companies are just going to have to eat that cost.”

That trend is only half of the bull case behind cloud computing ETFs, with Mr. Lala noting “increasing connectivity” more broadly is also positive for the sector.

“We have added one billion people online just in the past year; in 2019 just over four billion people had Internet access and today over five billion people are connected online,” Mr. Lala says. “You are definitely seeing a massive shift of people moving online and that is what cloud-based technology is all about.”

DevOps is now a teenager. Like a human teenager, it’s light years from infancy, but not yet fully mature and still a little awkward. It’s getting there, though. It has to: The pressure to release more software faster was intense even before COVID-19 shifted it into overdrive.

We’ve already mastered many critical elements vital to DevOps success. There’s no disagreement on key tenets: Collaboration is king, automation is essential, and “continuous everything” matters, including continuous integration/deployment/testing and continuous improvement.

One component of continuous improvement is to actively seek out the mistakes that impede success and work to avoid them. Here are three DevOps mistakes I’ve seen hundreds of Global 2000 companies make, along with suggestions on how to avoid them.

1. Overburdening developers
With digital transformation on the top of every CIO’s 2021 agenda, the business expects a steady stream of game-changing functionality – delivered at record speed – to blow away the competition.

Of course, this is a team effort involving everyone from developers to product owners, testers, ops, and SREs. But whenever more features are urgently needed or something falls short of expectations, who takes the heat? It’s almost always the developers. But unless you’re a GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), you probably don’t have the luxury of top-notch developers knocking on your door. Attracting and retaining valuable developers is an ongoing struggle.

It’s hard enough to satisfy the business’s insatiable demand for software when your developers are focused on developing. That’s why your strategy to “shift left” things like testing and security needs to go beyond the common response of just dumping more responsibility on the developers.

Don’t get me wrong: Building both quality and security into the application from the start is absolutely essential. But do it in a way that doesn’t substantially add to developers’ already hefty burden. Otherwise, your top development talent is likely to move to an organization that lets them focus on the creative work they crave.

2. Expecting everyone to be a superstar
Every organization and every team member can – with the right approach and the appropriate training/support – contribute to the organization’s DevOps success. But don’t expect everyone to contribute to the same extent, in the same way.

The early adopters of any movement, process, or technology tend to be your superstars and overachievers. They’re passionate about their work, they track all emerging trends in their field, and they’re intrinsically motivated to do whatever’s needed to make it work. From constantly reshaping proposed solutions to hunting down ways to solve the next nagging problem to building new approaches and extensions that are contributed back to the broader community, they’re all in. And for the most part, they make it work, delivering impressive results.

But it’s not so easy to scale this success. Most application delivery professionals don’t work this way. Even those who excel in their job don’t necessarily share this sense of adventure and primal urge to bring something new to life. They’ve spent years, often decades, perfecting their craft, and they aren’t always eager to adopt a dramatically different way of working.

Moreover, different enterprise teams have different skillsets, comfort zones, priorities, and often vastly different application stacks and compliance/governance requirements. The DevOps approach and toolset that works great for the startup-like team working on your mobile experience might not fare so well with the SAP-focused teams responsible for the back end.

Nevertheless, everything is connected, and everyone needs to be brought under a broader DevOps umbrella if you really want to accelerate innovation enterprise-wide. Often, the path to that scalable success involves:

Persisting the core philosophy underlying the initial adoption
Offering additional enterprise-friendly options in terms of toolsets and practices
Introducing an overarching layer of orchestration, visibility, and governance (there it is – the nasty g-word!) across the various groups working on related systems and projects
3. Releasing without sufficient insight into the overall user experience
Today’s users have exceedingly high expectations and a low tolerance for anything they perceive as a problem. Forrester recently found that even a tiny improvement in customer experience can have staggering impacts on the company’s bottom line. They estimate that just a one-point CX index increase (on a scale from 0 to 100) can boost annual revenue significantly – for example, $1.1B (automotive), $496M (retail), or $388M (telecom). It’s fair to assume that a minor slip in the opposite CX direction will result in a comparable revenue loss.

Of course, everyone on the team wants to create and ship software that users love. It’s one team, one fight to the finish line. But different roles bring different perspectives, strengths, and weaknesses to the table. From planning, testing, and releasing to monitoring, you need to engage team members who really understand the business and doggedly defend the overall user experience.

Many DevOps teams are still relying solely on low-level technical checks (e.g., unit testing) to determine if a release candidate is safe to unleash. Such tests can be great for catching coding mistakes…but much more is needed to deliver the exceptional experience that will ultimately give your organization an edge. This includes:

Risk-based testing so you can instantly decide if a new test failure is truly a showstopper
End-to-end functional testing of transactions (e.g., from mobile to APIs and packaged apps like SAP and Salesforce, all the way back to custom apps and mainframes)

Load/performance testing to ensure the application scales to meet surges in demand
If your organization is making these mistakes, rest assured – you’re not alone, nor are you the first. These pitfalls are common in enterprise DevOps. The good news? Unlike a human teenager, they’re relatively easy to correct and get on track.

According to a recent Deloitte report on post COVID-19 enterprise implications, “…the pandemic is reshaping the global business landscape and fundamentally changing how people around the world live and work… However, every new normal eventually gets replaced by a new new normal, so in our view it makes sense to call the post-COVID business environment the next normal.”

The report delved further into the changing business conditions and priorities emerging from the pandemic, highlighting the following among other takeaways:

Cloud computing is poised to accelerate, with 80% of respondents stating that cloud is now the most relevant technology
Next normal customer engagement strategies will be driven by digital channels and flexible customer experiences
These points reflect what we’re also seeing in the industry. Cloud offers organizations numerous opportunities to accelerate innovation, reduce costs and increase flexibility. By deploying our Digital Automation Intelligence (DAI) Platform via the cloud, companies of all sizes can accelerate the pace of delivery while ensuring a high-quality customer experience.

This brings us to the second takeaway from the Deloitte report. In the next normal, customer engagement strategies will be an even more critical competitive differentiator, with shifting most transactions to digital channels highlighted as the most popular strategy. Companies simply cannot do this effectively if they fail to test the entire user journey.

Now more than ever, organizations must automate the entire test lifecycle and understand the quality of the experiences they are delivering. With our market-leading user-centric approach to testing, Eggplant enables companies to continually refine their digital properties based upon how customers are actually interacting with the technology. As a result, businesses can quickly and easily understand the quantified user impact of new product versions both prior to release and after the software has been deployed—ensuring continuous quality tied to business outcomes.

Through our hosted platform companies can more quickly avail of these capabilities, enjoying enhanced levels of automation, faster time to market and an accelerated pace of continuous delivery.

As organizations navigate the next normal, a laser focus on customer experiences and a technologically flexible business environment will be critical. Eggplant seamlessly addresses both of these requirements, enabling companies to choose the right deployment option for their needs and continually test the quality of their digital experiences.

A new report from venture capital and M&A data provider PitchBook has explored how DevOps tools will continue to blossom in developer and enterprise contexts – as well as how Covid-19 has quickened digital transformation.

The company’s latest quarterly emerging tech report on cloud tech focused on an overview of technologies related to DevOps as it sees opportunities in ‘broader organisational efforts to make complex systems, workflows and other processes more cohesive, responsive, and manageable.’

With this in mind, PitchBook’s area of analysis for DevOps includes spaces such as enterprise communication and collaboration tools, low-code and robotic process automation (RPA).

Overall, the pandemic is increasing the pace of CI/CD adoption as more companies work to move application development processes from behind the firewall and into cloud environments. In terms of how this looks practically, the report sees a wider increase.

“We expect this to drive more investment and innovation in collaboration and communication ecosystems that can facilitate the distributed enterprise,” the report noted. “This trend will also encourage a quicker shift to cloud computing as businesses seek to minimise location-based manual operations.”

As companies shift to a changing style of work, DevOps can also help with this. “Organisations are evolving into continuous creators of digital IP,” the report noted. “To be successful, they must find ways to streamline and prioritise product creation and reduce administrative bottlenecks.

“DevOps has the potential to help organisations realise these goals, while making it easier to manage the complexity and fast-paced nature of today’s IT landscape.”

The report focused on two primary funding announcements in the past quarter; CircleCI, who raised $100 million in a series E round in April, and developer collaboration platform Postman, who secured $150m in June. Collaboration technology more widely also saw an uptick, including deals for Loom, , and Miro.

The latter two are key to an emerging trend which the report notes as ‘DesignOps’. Improvements in the software development supply chain, PitchBook said, are putting pressure on companies to enhance design practices and facilitate better collaboration.

Writing for this publication earlier this month, Patrick Hubbard, of SolarWinds, explored whether DevOps and APM would see an uptick from the ‘next normal.’

“IT tends to hunker down during uncertain times and run as little as possible – but I’d argue the value [DevOps] brings to IT teams of many different sizes can be key to enterprise transformation ambitions – digital, survival, or otherwise,” he wrote.

“It remains unclear what the ‘next normal’ entails, but the fundamentals of great service delivery remain the same,” Hubbard added. “The DevOps focus on flexibility and continuous process improvement to break transformation logjams comes in handy when the future of technology is full of new possibility.”

Why Healthcare Is Moving to the Cloud

Several converging forces are pushing healthcare organizations toward cloud-based architectures:

• Data volume: Electronic health records (EHRs), medical imaging (DICOM), genomics, and IoT-connected devices generate massive, fast-growing datasets that on-premise hardware struggles to accommodate cost-effectively.
• Interoperability mandates: Regulatory requirements in many regions (for example, FHIR-based data exchange rules in the United States) push organizations to adopt API-first, cloud-native platforms.
• Telehealth expansion: The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically accelerated remote patient monitoring and virtual care, both of which depend on elastic, always-available cloud infrastructure.
• AI and analytics workloads: Machine-learning pipelines for diagnostics, drug discovery, and population health management require compute resources that are impractical to provision on-premise at most healthcare organizations.
• Disaster recovery and resilience: Cloud replication and geo-redundancy address business-continuity requirements that are difficult to meet with single-site data centers.

Market Segmentation

Understanding how analysts slice this market helps DevOps and cloud engineers align their work with where buyer demand is concentrating.

By System Type

• Clinical Information Systems (CIS): EHRs, clinical decision support, picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), laboratory information systems, and pharmacy management platforms. These are the highest-sensitivity workloads from a compliance standpoint (HIPAA, GDPR, and regional equivalents).
• Non-Clinical Information Systems: Revenue cycle management, HR, supply chain, and administrative analytics. These workloads are often the first to migrate because their compliance surface is smaller.

By Pricing Model

• Pay-As-You-Go: Consumption-based billing aligned to actual usage. Well-suited to variable workloads such as imaging processing or seasonal population-health runs.
• Spot / Reserved Pricing: Pre-committed or interruptible capacity at reduced rates. Used for batch analytics, training ML models, and other fault-tolerant workloads.

By Service Model

• Software-as-a-Service (SaaS): Vendor-managed EHR, telehealth, and revenue cycle applications delivered via browser or API. Fastest time-to-value for clinical teams; lowest infrastructure burden for IT.
• Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS): Virtual machines, storage, and networking rented from a public cloud provider. Gives engineering teams full control of the OS and middleware stack — important when migrating legacy clinical applications.
• Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS): Managed databases, container orchestration, and integration middleware. Increasingly popular for building FHIR APIs, HL7 integration engines, and data lake pipelines without managing underlying servers.

Key Vendors in the Space

The Verified Market Research report highlights the following companies as significant players. Each brings a different angle to cloud-enabled healthcare:

• Allscripts Healthcare Solutions — EHR and care coordination platforms with cloud-hosted deployment options.
• Dell Technologies — Hybrid cloud infrastructure and edge computing for clinical environments.
• IBM — Hybrid cloud (IBM Cloud), Watson Health AI capabilities, and managed security services relevant to HIPAA workloads.
• Koninklijke Philips N.V. — Cloud-connected diagnostic imaging and patient monitoring ecosystems.
• NTT Data Corporation — Managed IT services and systems integration for large hospital networks.
• Carestream Health — Cloud PACS and medical imaging workflow solutions.
• Carecloud Corporation — Cloud-native practice management and telehealth for ambulatory care.
• Athenahealth — SaaS-based EHR and revenue cycle management.
• Sectra AB — Medical imaging IT and enterprise imaging networks.
• Siemens Healthineers AG — Diagnostic imaging, laboratory diagnostics, and digital health platforms.

Notably, hyperscale public cloud providers (AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud) are not listed in this vendor set but are foundational infrastructure suppliers to many of the companies above. Any complete architectural assessment of this market must account for their healthcare-specific compliance programs and managed services.

Regional Breakdown

Adoption rates and regulatory environments vary significantly by geography:

• North America (USA, Canada, Mexico): The most mature market. US adoption is driven by Meaningful Use legacy requirements, HIPAA compliance tooling from major cloud providers, and large integrated delivery networks with capital to invest.
• Europe (UK, Germany, Spain, Italy, and rest of EU): GDPR creates strict data residency and sovereignty requirements. EU healthcare organizations often favor private or sovereign cloud deployments alongside public cloud.
• Asia-Pacific (India, China, Japan, South Korea, Australia): High growth potential, particularly in India and China, driven by large unserved populations and government digitization initiatives. Data localization laws add architectural complexity.
• Latin America (Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru): Emerging adoption. Brazil’s LGPD (Lei Geral de Proteção de Dados) mirrors GDPR and is shaping cloud procurement decisions.
• Middle East & Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa): Government-led smart health initiatives and Vision 2030-type programs are creating greenfield cloud deployments in some countries.

Technical and Operational Considerations for DevOps Teams

For engineering teams building or operating cloud infrastructure in healthcare, several recurring themes demand attention:

Compliance Automation

HIPAA Business Associate Agreements (BAAs), SOC 2 Type II certifications, and regional equivalents must be in place before any protected health information (PHI) touches a cloud resource. Infrastructure-as-code tools (Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Bicep) should encode compliant baseline configurations and enforce them via policy-as-code frameworks such as Open Policy Agent or AWS Config Rules.

Data Residency and Encryption

Healthcare data must often remain within specific geographic boundaries. Cloud region selection, replication policies, and key management (customer-managed keys rather than provider-managed) need to be designed explicitly rather than accepted as defaults.

Interoperability Pipelines

HL7 v2, FHIR R4, and DICOM are the dominant data exchange standards. Cloud-native integration services (Azure API for FHIR, AWS HealthLake, Google Cloud Healthcare API) reduce the engineering burden of building and maintaining these pipelines, but teams still need deep domain knowledge to validate data fidelity.

Zero-Trust Security Posture

Healthcare environments are high-value ransomware targets. A zero-trust architecture — where every service-to-service call is authenticated, authorized, and logged — is increasingly considered a baseline rather than a premium control. Service meshes (Istio, Linkerd) and identity-aware proxies support this model in containerized environments.

Market Outlook Through 2027

The Verified Market Research report projects sustained growth in cloud adoption across healthcare through 2027, citing the following drivers:

• Accelerated digital transformation triggered by COVID-19 and the normalization of telehealth.
• Increasing investment in AI-assisted diagnostics and precision medicine, both of which require scalable cloud compute.
• Consolidation among health systems creating large, complex IT environments where cloud flexibility outweighs on-premise capital expenditure.
• Ongoing regulatory harmonization (particularly FHIR mandates) pushing vendors toward API-first, cloud-native architectures.

Barriers to growth include cybersecurity concerns, legacy system integration complexity, workforce skills gaps, and varying regulatory maturity across regions.

Summary

Cloud computing in healthcare is not a single market but a convergence of clinical systems, infrastructure services, pricing models, and regional regulatory environments. For DevOps and cloud engineering teams, the opportunity lies in building compliant, automated, and interoperable platforms that meet the strict data governance requirements of the healthcare sector while enabling the analytics and AI workloads that drive clinical value. The 2027 horizon referenced in analyst forecasts represents both a growth target and a technical roadmap challenge for the organizations and vendors competing in this space.

Source: Verified Market Research, “Cloud Computing in Healthcare Market” report (as summarized by Scientect, August 2020).

What Is Government Cloud Computing?

Government cloud computing refers to the delivery of cloud infrastructure, platforms, and software to public-sector organizations under terms that address regulatory compliance, data sovereignty, and security frameworks such as FedRAMP (in the United States), IL ratings (in the UK), and equivalent national standards elsewhere. Vendors typically operate dedicated or logically isolated environments to meet these requirements, distinguishing government cloud from standard commercial offerings.

Market Overview and COVID-19 Impact

Research published in 2020 projected sustained growth for the government cloud computing market through 2027. The COVID-19 pandemic acted as a significant accelerant: rapid shifts to remote work, the need for scalable citizen-facing digital services, and emergency procurement timelines pushed agencies to adopt cloud platforms faster than pre-pandemic roadmaps had anticipated. At the same time, the pandemic disrupted supply chains for on-premises hardware, making cloud-first strategies more attractive by default.

The pandemic also introduced new risks—cyber threats targeting healthcare and emergency-response systems rose sharply—reinforcing the importance of cloud providers that could offer managed security operations alongside raw compute capacity.

Key Market Players

The following vendors were identified as major participants in the government cloud computing market as of 2020. Each brings a distinct combination of compliance certifications, dedicated government regions, and professional-services depth.

• Microsoft – Azure Government and Microsoft 365 Government offerings cover FedRAMP High, DoD IL2/IL4/IL5, and ITAR workloads. Microsoft has long-standing enterprise relationships with civilian and defense agencies.
• Amazon Web Services (AWS) – AWS GovCloud (US) regions are air-gapped from commercial infrastructure and support the most FedRAMP-authorized services of any provider. AWS also operates a Secret Region under the CIA contract.
• Google – Google Cloud’s Government Cloud portfolio expanded significantly post-2020 with FedRAMP High authorization and Assured Workloads controls.
• IBM – IBM Cloud for Government combines hybrid cloud architecture (Red Hat OpenShift) with managed services and strong systems-integration heritage in public-sector IT.
• Oracle – Oracle Government Cloud and Oracle Cloud@Customer address agencies that require on-premises data residency while consuming cloud-managed services.
• Salesforce – Salesforce Government Cloud provides CRM and citizen-engagement platforms certified for FedRAMP Moderate and High workloads.
• Cisco Systems – Contributes networking, collaboration (Webex), and security tooling that underlies many government cloud deployments.
• Dell Technologies – Supplies converged and hyper-converged infrastructure that supports on-premises and hybrid government cloud architectures.
• VMware – VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware’s sovereign cloud partners enable agencies to run familiar VM-based workloads in compliant environments.
• Verizon – Provides managed cloud and network services with government-grade SLAs, particularly for agencies requiring dedicated connectivity.
• CGI Group – A systems integrator with deep public-sector experience, offering managed cloud migration and application modernization services.

Market Segmentation by Service Type

Government cloud adoption mirrors the broader cloud market in its three primary service delivery models, though procurement and compliance requirements differ significantly from commercial contracts.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

IaaS provides virtualized compute, storage, and networking on demand. Government agencies use IaaS to retire aging data centers, host legacy applications with minimal re-engineering, and surge capacity during high-demand events such as census operations or emergency response. Key considerations include FedRAMP authorization level, data-center location, and physical access controls.

Platform as a Service (PaaS)

PaaS gives development teams managed runtime environments, databases, messaging services, and DevOps toolchains without the overhead of OS-level administration. Government PaaS adoption accelerates the delivery of citizen-facing applications and internal workflow tools while keeping compliance controls enforced at the platform layer rather than within each application team.

Software as a Service (SaaS)

SaaS is the fastest route to cloud adoption for many agencies. Procurement of pre-authorized SaaS applications—such as email, collaboration suites, and CRM platforms—eliminates the need for agencies to manage underlying infrastructure or achieve their own compliance certifications. The FedRAMP Marketplace lists authorized SaaS products that agencies can onboard under existing authorizations.

Market Segmentation by Application Area

Local and State Government

State and local agencies are significant cloud consumers. Use cases include permitting portals, benefits administration, public-safety dispatch systems, and tax-processing platforms. Budget constraints make the operational-expenditure model of cloud particularly attractive at this tier, as agencies can avoid large upfront capital outlays. Multi-tenancy shared-services models—where a state consolidates cloud contracts on behalf of its municipalities—are an emerging procurement pattern.

Defense and Military

Defense cloud requirements are among the most demanding of any vertical. Workloads span unclassified, secret, and top-secret classifications, each requiring progressively more restrictive physical and logical controls. Major initiatives such as the U.S. Department of Defense’s JWCC (Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability) contract and the UK’s Dstl cloud programs reflect the scale of investment. Mission-critical applications include logistics, intelligence analysis, command-and-control systems, and simulation environments.

Key Market Drivers

• Digital transformation mandates – Government modernization strategies in the US, EU, UK, and other regions explicitly require agencies to adopt cloud-first approaches for new systems.
• Cost reduction pressure – Cloud enables agencies to convert fixed data-center costs into variable expenditure, and to avoid refresh cycles for aging hardware.
• Scalability for peak demand – Census operations, tax seasons, emergency-response portals, and vaccine-registration systems all require elastic capacity that on-premises infrastructure cannot economically provide.
• Improved security posture – Hyperscale cloud providers invest in security tooling and personnel at a scale most government agencies cannot match independently.
• Regulatory compliance frameworks – The maturing of FedRAMP, StateRAMP, and equivalent international frameworks reduces the compliance burden of cloud adoption.

Key Market Challenges

• Data sovereignty and residency concerns – Agencies in many jurisdictions require that data remain within national borders and be inaccessible to foreign governments, complicating the use of global hyperscale infrastructure.
• Legacy system complexity – Many government workloads run on decades-old mainframe or client-server architectures that are expensive and risky to migrate.
• Procurement cycle length – Government acquisition processes are inherently slow, often lagging technology evolution by years.
• Skills gaps – Public-sector organizations frequently lack the cloud-engineering talent needed to architect, migrate, and operate cloud environments securely.
• Vendor lock-in risk – Agencies are increasingly aware of the risks of over-dependence on a single provider, prompting multi-cloud and open-standards policies.

What to Look for When Evaluating Government Cloud Vendors

For DevOps and infrastructure teams working within or alongside government agencies, vendor selection should consider the following criteria:

1. Authorization level – Confirm the provider holds the relevant authorization (e.g., FedRAMP High, DoD IL5) for your workload classification.
2. Geographic availability – Verify that compliant regions exist in the required jurisdiction and that data-residency commitments are contractually binding.
3. Service breadth – Assess whether the authorized service catalog covers your required IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS components, not just a subset.
4. Managed security services – Evaluate SIEM integration, threat detection, and incident-response capabilities offered natively or through the provider’s partner ecosystem.
5. Interoperability and exit strategy – Prioritize providers that support open APIs and container standards (OCI, Kubernetes) to reduce lock-in.
6. Support SLAs – Government mission-critical systems require defined escalation paths and response times, which should be specified in the contract.

Outlook

The government cloud computing market was on a strong growth trajectory as of 2020, with COVID-19 compressing adoption timelines that were already accelerating. The competitive landscape is dominated by a handful of hyperscale providers with the investment capacity to achieve and maintain the required compliance certifications, but a broader ecosystem of SaaS vendors, systems integrators, and specialized managed-service providers fills the gaps between raw infrastructure and mission-ready capability. For DevOps practitioners, understanding the compliance landscape and the specific authorization status of each service is as important as understanding the technical architecture.

Note: Market figures, growth-rate projections, and forecast data referenced in the original 2020 Market Research Intellect report have not been independently verified. Readers requiring current market-size estimates should consult up-to-date research from analysts such as Gartner, IDC, or Forrester.