For banks, a common transformative action being implemented is moving a cornerstone application to a cloud environment. In this current “digital revolution,” timelines for product delivery and information analysis are few and far between.

Customers set the pace by consuming products and information on-demand. This places immense pressure on banks to deliver continuously and reliably to satisfy the rapidly escalating demand for all types of the services they offer. Software is the center of the business universe, and it’s vital to all aspects of operations. Building and reliably delivering software is now vital to short and long-term success.

As banks continue to maintain and modernize older applications, they are also creating and delivering new applications that can wear out their staff and budgets while increasing technical and process complexities between organizations.

In this digital economy, failure to deliver, delivering the wrong solutions, or delayed delivery greatly affects organizations’ ability to satisfy required business outcomes and in short, make the customer happy.

DevOps managed services
A significant portion of technology has to be spent focused on software engineering infrastructure. The blend of workloads, applications and broad access to the resources paired with consistent delivery methods to support software development is vital. How technology is used is as equally important as to the methods and processes for creating and delivering software code.

Most development teams have limited visibility across and within their software “production” or the coding and delivery processes. Visibility is paramount and getting the processed data into the hands of key stakeholders is critical. Lead-time, deployment frequency and more, enabled with a complete and automated delivery and a mapping of the value-stream, or team members involved, can provide great value to the enterprise.

A very powerful and proven method for companies to access and wrap their arms around data and constraint resolution is through DevOps managed services. DevOps are a set of practices that combines software development and IT operations in order to shorten the development cycle and continuously deliver software at the highest quality level. DevOps provide real-time visibility into the integrated technical-development operations processes. Data is generated from the use of hardware and software systems in response to the actions of the contributors/engineers in the value-stream from code designing to release to production.

DevOps managed services help organizations identify vulnerable process areas to remedy and improve suspect code and provide feedback for continuous improvement. Code scanning detection also helps identify code weak points and anomalies and provide improvement assurance. When there are fewer issues, the value-stream operates more efficiently, placing less stress on the team, including testing processes and the infrastructure they leverage to produce and reliably deliver.

Eliminating Alert Fatigue
Anyone who’s been in the DevOps space is probably familiar with alert fatigue. At the beginning of a DevOps transformation, engineers set up as many monitors as they can to catch issues before they happen or to understand when things start to go awry. The next thing that happens is that their inbox is getting flooded with all these alerts and, suddenly, everything becomes less meaningful and no one is reacting to anything, which is essentially the same as not having any monitoring in the first place.

It’s a big problem and finding the balance between making sure everything is captured and not overloading everybody responding to these issues is a key DevOps transformational issue.

Managers quickly have to fix the problem of engineers being woken up at three o’clock in the morning and then looking into something that actually ends up being a false positive. Managers need the right tools and processes to efficiently catch meaningful events and only alerting people when it’s absolutely necessary.

One way to clearly quantify alert fatigue is to look at the number of alerts per person, and the frequency and timing of the alerts.

Every time there’s an alert, there are three possible outcomes: it’s an actual problem that must get fixed; it’s a premature alert, or it’s something that needs to be watched to determine if any action is needed.

In the latter two cases, the threshold is adjusted or the engineer getting the alert decides that it’s really doing nothing for the process and turns the alert off. It’s a process of continuous improvement, but what you wind up with ultimately is meaningful alerts.

Why banks need DevOps
The three most common reasons local and regional banks are adopting DevOps is for security, efficiency, and application reliability.

The responsibility and even accountability for security is rapidly shifting in the direction of DevOps engineers, as they have a view into the broad architecture of the processes and systems used to deploy the various operations.

Going forward, DevOps engineers and DevSecOps processes, or the development of security and operations processes, are going to be even more accountable for security. This trend should be a strong consideration, as good DevSecOps also makes application deployments, operations, and service monitoring easier, and more secure.

Overview

A landmark report published in 2018 by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) organization — authored by Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim — offers one of the most rigorous examinations of DevOps maturity and its economic impact to date. Titled Accelerate: State of DevOps 2018: Strategies for a New Economy, the study aggregates five years of scientific research and more than 30,000 survey responses, conducted in collaboration with Google Cloud.

The report’s central message is that DevOps is not merely an IT methodology — it is becoming a measurable economic driver for organizations worldwide.

DevOps Is Maturing as a Practice

One of the report’s most significant observations is that the DevOps discipline is maturing rapidly. Practitioners are described as “getting better at what they do and pushing the pace for everyone else” — meaning that the performance gap between high-performing and low-performing teams is widening, raising the baseline expectation for the entire industry.

This maturation signals that organizations still operating with siloed development and operations teams face an increasingly steep competitive disadvantage.

Competitive Advantage Through Software Delivery

The report draws a direct line between software delivery performance and business outcomes. Organizations that excel at software delivery are shown to achieve measurable gains across multiple dimensions:

• Increased profitability
• Higher productivity
• Greater market share
• Improved customer satisfaction
• Better ability to achieve organizational goals

This positions DevOps adoption not as an IT cost center decision, but as a strategic business investment with direct revenue and growth implications.

Cloud Infrastructure: Doing It Right Makes All the Difference

The report emphasizes that cloud adoption alone is insufficient — how a team uses the cloud determines performance outcomes. According to the findings, teams that leverage all of cloud computing’s essential characteristics are 23 times more likely to be high performers compared to those who adopt cloud in name only without realizing its architectural benefits.

Dr. Nicole Forsgren summarized this finding directly:

“The data this year is the compelling case of doing cloud right. Adopting essential cloud characteristics drives high performance and differentiates the highest performers from those who may say they are in the cloud, but are unable to realize performance gains because their technology and processes aren’t executed correctly.”

— Dr. Nicole Forsgren, DORA

This is a critical distinction for DevOps and platform engineering teams: migrating workloads to cloud infrastructure without adopting cloud-native design principles — such as on-demand self-service, elasticity, broad network access, resource pooling, and measured service — does not yield the performance improvements that genuine cloud adoption delivers.

Open Source Software and High Performance

The report identifies open source software as another differentiator for top performers. Key findings include:

• High-performing teams are 1.75 times more likely to make extensive use of open source software.
• The same teams are 1.5 times more likely to plan to expand their open source usage in the future.

This correlation suggests that high performers are actively building on the speed, transparency, and community innovation that open source ecosystems offer, rather than relying heavily on proprietary, closed-source tooling.

The Outsourcing Trap

One of the more counterintuitive findings in the report concerns outsourcing. While outsourcing individual functions can reduce costs and provide flexible staffing, the data shows it can actively harm overall software delivery performance when applied at a functional level.

Specifically, low-performing teams are nearly 4 times as likely to outsource entire functions — such as testing or operations — compared to their highest-performing counterparts. Top organizations tend to keep these capabilities in-house, treating them as core competencies rather than commodity services.

The implication for engineering leaders is clear: outsourcing critical DevOps functions may look attractive on a cost spreadsheet but can undermine the feedback loops, shared ownership, and continuous improvement culture that drive long-term performance.

Key Technical Practices That Drive Efficiency

The report highlights several technical practices that consistently correlate with high performance. Teams and organizations looking to improve should prioritize:

• Monitoring and observability: Ensuring systems produce actionable telemetry and that teams can understand system state in production.
• Continuous testing: Automated testing embedded throughout the development pipeline, not just at release gates.
• Database change management: Treating database schema changes as version-controlled, automated deployments rather than manual, high-risk events.
• Shifting security left: Integrating security practices and tooling early in the software development lifecycle (SDLC), rather than treating security as a final gate before release.

Why This Research Matters

The DORA 2018 report is significant because it moves DevOps discourse beyond anecdote and vendor marketing. By grounding findings in longitudinal survey data across thousands of organizations and multiple industries, it provides engineering leaders and executives with evidence-based guidance for investment decisions.

For DevOps practitioners, the takeaways are actionable: adopt cloud infrastructure fully rather than superficially, embrace open source tooling, invest in observability and testing, keep critical functions in-house, and treat security as a shared, continuous responsibility. Together, these practices do not just improve deployment frequency or change failure rates — they create measurable competitive and economic advantages at the organizational level.