8 Indicators That Your Business Requires the Expertise of a DevOps Consultant

A solid and reliable IT infrastructure management system makes up the backbone of your business and the guarantee for the continuity of your operations. Experienced IT infrastructure management specialists and DevOps consultants help create the right balance between development and operations, ensuring seamless collaboration and improved processes. 

What Does a DevOps Consultant Do? 

From optimizing processes to establishing and encouraging methodologies that foster the efficiency, quality, and velocity of software development, a DevOps consultant can help you handle your software infrastructure with confidence. 

The main responsibilities of an experienced DevOps consultant are as follows: 

   - Optimizing and streamlining the development and deployment processes for better efficiency and productivity. 

   - Creating a safe space for improved cross-team collaboration and shared responsibility. 

   - Introducing and implementing tools for task automation, error reduction, and faster delivery of solutions. 

   - Setting up CI/CD (continuous integration and continuous delivery) practices. 

   - Managing infrastructure via IaC (Infrastructure as Code) processes. 

   - Establishing monitoring and consistent feedback delivery practices to track performance and identify issues early on.

   - Integrating robust security measures into the software development lifecycle. 

How to Know When Your Company Needs DevOps Consulting Services? 

Reading the above description, you may think: “What’s the big deal? My tech team can handle this.” However, the reality is slightly different. People in leadership roles often don’t see the whole volume of work that’s being done by their employees. Your developers already have a lot on their plate. Besides, the responsibilities of a DevOps consultant are completely different from those of a software engineer. Even if there happens to be an overlap in their skills and responsibilities, their main functions, goals, and tasks are different. 

As your organization grows, it is only a matter of time before you notice the need for a DevOps consultant arise. Here are a few signs that indicate it’s time for you to look for a competent DevOps specialist for your organization:

1. Regular Delays in Deployment 

If the deployment of software projects is frequently delayed, it might be a sign that there is a misalignment in the workflows between your development and operations teams. Delays in deployment can lead to dissatisfied clients and difficulties in your partnerships. A professional DevOps consultant can handle this issue by guiding the setup of the right processes and ensuring a smooth collaboration across teams. They will help reduce the time needed for new features or bug fixes to be implemented by streamlining your deployment pipeline. 

2. Communication Issues 

Deployment is not the only sacrifice you make when you lack the assistance of a DevOps specialist. Poor communication between your development and operations teams can hinder the overall progress of your projects and IT infrastructure in general. It will cause misunderstandings and lead to ambiguity when it comes to responsibilities. By introducing proper communication channels, a DevOps consultant can help ensure that both your development team and operations team are working together for a common purpose. 

3. Performance Challenges

As soon as you notice your systems having a difficult time handling increased workloads, it’s a sign that your organization needs DevOps. Leaving such issues unresolved can lead to poor performance and inadequate scalability. Such approaches as load balancing, autoscaling, and optimization can come in handy when you are facing performance issues during your peak loads. A DevOps consultant ensures the successful implementation of these solutions, enabling your systems to function properly regardless of the volume of the workload you are dealing with at a given moment. 

4. Complex Architecture Management Hurdles 

Over time your architecture changes and evolves, becoming more complex and requiring more scrupulous management and monitoring approaches. If you and your team find it hard to manage your organizational architecture, it’s yet another sign you need to hire a DevOps specialist. It will save you the headache of having to deal with such problems as security vulnerabilities and maintenance issues. By setting up IaC and containerization practices, a DevOps consultant will lift the burden of complex architecture management off your shoulders, ensuring easier processes and better scalability. 

5. Poor User Experience Due to Frequent Outages and System Downtime 

If you fail to resolve incidents in a timely manner, causing prolonged service disruptions and frequent system outages, you are in for an unpleasant challenge. This will leave your users dissatisfied and can even harm your company reputation if you don’t solve the issue soon enough. Do you want to risk losing your users or are you willing to invest in the introduction of systemized DevOps processes in your organization in order to have your services restored and functioning on time? 

We believe there is only one reasonable answer to this question. A DevOps consultant will help you enhance the stability of your systems, carry out proactive monitoring, and guide you in implementing strong incident response strategies to eliminate downtime, or at least, bring it down to the minimum. Besides, DevOps practices will also automate incident detection and resolution procedures, thus ensuring speedy and efficient service restoration. 

6. Absence of CI/CD Processes

The lack of continuous integration and continuous deployment processes is, firstly, an indication that your business is falling behind in the implementation of modern technologies that could otherwise essentially improve your operational efficiency. CI/CD pipelines are extremely important for software testing and deployment automation, which makes regular and full-functioning releases possible. A DevOps consultant can guide you in the right direction and help you make the most optimal decision for the implementation or optimization of your CI/CD processes. They can study your project requirements and design a CI/CD pipeline that best suits the project in question. 

7. Too Much Manual Work 

Manual work doesn’t make an organization sound reliable in a time when technologies have automated everything that is possible to automate. It sounds especially worse if you have too much manual work in software development and IT infrastructure management. Manual work is time-consuming and can lead to unwanted errors. You should definitely consider taking advice from a DevOps consultant if your team is flooded with manual tasks. The right DevOps consultant has extensive experience of working with automation tools and practices and can help you transform your cumbersome manual processes into fast, efficient, and automated workflows. This will save time, improve operational accuracy, minimize human error, and enable your team to focus on work that matters more. 

8. Overwhelmed with the Sheer Number of DevOps Tools

DevOps consulting services can be especially useful if you are a newbie in the field. The DevOps ecosystem comes with an enormous amount of DevOps tools and solutions meant for the many different aspects of software development lifecycle. CI/CD platforms, version control systems, monitoring and detection software, and more - they are all there ready to be used when need be. But how to know which ones are the right tools for your organization? 

Well, this is where you may consider getting some guidance from a DevOps consultant. By assessing your organizational needs and the specific requirements of your software projects, a DevOps specialist can offer invaluable insights in choosing the right DevOps tools for your business. Furthermore, they can help you implement these tools and integrate them into your processes painlessly, thus ensuring your company is armed with the right technology solutions. 

How to Choose a Reliable DevOps Consultant? 

To help you choose a trustworthy and reliable DevOps consultant, we have made a quick checklist. If you follow the steps and criteria listed below, you are highly unlikely to bump into inexperienced or dishonest DevOps consultants: 

   - Carry out an internal audit and assess your current IT infrastructure in order to know the areas that are vulnerable, that cause delay, inefficiency or downtime. 

   - Make your expectations clear - what is it that you want to achieve with the help of DevOps consulting? Faster time to market, better software quality, or enhanced collaboration across teams? Maybe all of the above? 

   - Do a thorough research - choose consultants with relevant industry experience and positive testimonials. 

   - Make sure the communication is clear on both ends - let your DevOps consultant know of your expectations and hear their point of view on the matter. 

   - The right DevOps consultant studies and assesses your infrastructure or the project in question carefully, breaks your problem down into solvable chunks, and asks the corresponding engineers to integrate the needed tools and DevOps processes. 

   - Make sure your DevOps consultants are able to understand and collaborate with your internal tech team. This is of crucial importance, especially if there is going to be knowledge exchange and handoff of tasks later on. 

   - On this note, prepare your team for the change beforehand. Let them know of the benefits of DevOps consulting and its long-term value in order to overcome the initial change resistance easily. 

   - Set metrics to help you measure the benefits of your DevOps shift. Regularly go over these metrics and see if your transformation has brought any actual, tangible results to your business. Adjust accordingly. 

Parting Thoughts 

DevOps transformation is a huge step for any business. It can be especially challenging if you are just getting acquainted with it. Some companies need only tweaks and optimization in their DevOps practices, others are looking to make their first steps in DevOps. Regardless of your goals, the long-term benefits of DevOps practices are definitely worth the investment and the big shift. 

Faster software delivery and innovation, better cross-team collaboration, and automation of monotonous tasks - the input of an experienced DevOps consultant can be highly transformative for your organization. However, if you are still in doubt whether your business needs DevOps consulting services or not, our experts can help you find the right answer by assessing your software infrastructure and providing you with deep insights into the areas that would benefit from a DevOps touch. 

More helpful resources: 

   - Microsoft Azure vs. AWS vs. Google Cloud: Which One to Choose? 
   - 7 Benefits of Azure Cloud Migration from On-Premises Data Centers
   - How to Streamline the Process of Migration to the Cloud? 
   - Top 10 Cloud Migration Challenges and How to Overcome Them? 
   - A Guide to Successful Migration to the Cloud: Benefits, Approaches, and Best Practices
   - Mastering Azure's Well-Architected Framework for Cloud Success