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APAC businesses turn to DevOps to improve app quality, security

Security validation and metrics are some of the key trends in DevOps this year, according to CA Technologies

With the pressure to achieve greater business agility, more IT organisations in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region will look to DevOps as a way to ensure quality, security and performance of their applications.

This is a prediction made by CA Technologies on the key trends in DevOps, which aims to facilitate collaboration and communication between IT development and operations teams.

To improve the quality of software, and with growing customer expectations of digital experiences, more enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region will embrace continuous testing, according to Richard Gerdis, vice-president of DevOps, Asia-Pacific and Japan, CA Technologies.

“The only way to produce good, quality code is to test it rigorously, and, more importantly, to test it throughout the DevOps lifecycle. Testing can no longer be the job of quality assurance engineers alone; developers need to be able to test code and make the test results available to operations,” he said.

Over the past year, companies in the region have come under the spotlight for cyber security breaches, which are likely to drive greater adoption of DevOps to improve IT security.

In June 2016, Malaysia’s cyber security agency found that more than 2,000 servers in the country had been compromised, with access to them sold through an underground website. 

And in October, Singapore telco StarHub was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that was caused by compromised customer devices such as webcams.

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“Security is likely to continue being an important topic this year, given the growing intensity and sophistication of cyber threats,” said Gerdis. “In addition to speed and quality, good code also needs to protect users against cyber malice, and organisations from negative publicity and reputational damage,” he added.

For code to be safe, Gerdis said it must be deployed within a solid security architecture. “Security validation should be viewed as a special case of testing, as the requirements of security-related code testing are unique and dynamic, as well as involve experts and constituencies not usually included in the DevOps process,” said Gerdis.

“Testing can no longer be the job of quality assurance engineers alone; developers need to be able to test code and make the test results available to operations”
Richard Gerdis, CA Technologies

Measuring the success of DevOps is also expected to be on the radar this year, without which it can be difficult to improve IT operations. 

To that end, Gerdis said DevOps metrics can improve digital practices in many ways. He noted that collective metrics can uncover bottlenecks in processes, while individual metrics can pinpoint coaching needs and replicate good performance. 

“With this variety of benefits, it is highly plausible that the industry will concur on a common set of metrics this year,” he added.

Patrick Cher, an IT developer, told Computer Weekly that DevOps is definitely the focus among enterprises this year. “It will help developers understand what they are doing so it can lead to better quality and more secure code,” he said.

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