Interaction with Alok Uniyal from Infosys on leveraging Cloud DevOps to drive digital optimization and maximizing cloud benefits
CXOtoday has engaged in an exclusive interview with Alok Uniyal, Vice President and Head of IT Process Consulting Practice, Infosys
- What are the key benefits of driving innovation and agility through Cloud DevOps?
Cloud DevOps provides an automated and standardized environment for continuous integration and deployment, which enables teams to develop and deploy features rapidly and securely. The continuous feedback loop in DevOps, coupled with cloud-based development environments, fosters a culture of experimentation and innovation – as teams are able to iterate on new features quickly. Businesses have the ability to scale resources as per their need, thereby optimizing costs. Overall, it creates a safe and efficient environment for organizations to drive agility and innovation towards faster business value realization, without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.
- How can organizations explore the cost reduction potential of CloudOps to maximize their return on investment (ROI)?
Organizations need to do a proper due diligence, while identifying which workloads need to move to cloud, in what order, and in choosing the right cloud service provider(s). Adopting a multi-cloud strategy gives better cost-flexibility. Containerization enables portability, scalability, and resource efficiency. It is a well-known fact that cloud costs can add up quickly and exceed budgets. Hence, organizations must adopt a Cloud FinOps model to track usage patterns of cloud services and drive optimization for better ROI. Cloud FinOps brings together and balances the priorities of technology, business, and finance teams to drive cost accountability.
- What are the key factors organizations should consider when adopting Cloud DevOps?
Organizations need to consider several factors to ensure a successful implementation that delivers desired business value. They must begin by identifying the business drivers and putting in place a change management program. They must train or upskill their employees and focus on the structural and process changes required to foster collaboration between different functions. Companies must define measurable goals and KPIs and establish governance after considering the prevailing technology landscape and the future roadmap. . They must know and assess their existing infrastructure and portfolio, their requirements, the current challenges they face, the right cloud mix that’s appropriate to their needs, and so on. They must plan their resources and identify their security needs to ensure Cloud DevOps can meet these requirements.
- How can organizations measure the success and impact of their Cloud DevOps initiatives?
The success of Cloud DevOps can be measured along four primary dimensions – efficiency, agility, reliability, and quality. Better utilization of resources, improved knowledge sharing, faster deployments, quick time to repair failures, reduction in lead times, lower production outages and defect rates are some of the measures to look for. DORA metrics are a good set to start with, as identified by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) group. It includes four critical metrics – deployment frequency, lead time for changes, change failure rate, and mean time to recover. It’s important to co-relate these to business outcomes to measure success in true sense.
- Explain how Infosys is leveraging cloud technology to optimize digital infrastructure?
Infosys has built over 35,000 cloud assets and more than 300 industry blueprints under the brand Infosys Cobalt, which helps us accelerate the cloud journey of our clients. We have also established a robust partner ecosystem comprising of major cloud service providers, which we leverage in building cloud solutions for our clients. We bring innovation at scale and enable enterprises to redesign their enterprise from the core and build new cloud-first capabilities to create seamless user experiences and deliver business outcomes. Enterprises can leverage our broad portfolio of capabilities and services, suitable for use across industry verticals, regardless of where they may be in their own cloud journeys.
- Can you share any success stories or case studies where organizations have achieved significant benefits through Cloud DevOps?
We have helped enterprise achieve optimal results through various services under Cloud DevOps. For example, we implemented DevOps on Azure for a global client in the B2C business, helping them enhance their digital experience for a wide user base, through zero down time deployment and reduced provisioning time (by 90%). For another client, we implemented a zero-touch DevSecOps solution for a mission-critical application deployed on AWS. The implementation helped the company achieve significant annual savings.
- How is Infosys implementing DevOps across all technologies and contributing to accelerate an organization’s value stream?
Infosys adopts a holistic approach to DevOps implementation addressing the People, Process and Tooling aspects. A robust in-house enablement program ensures that people are trained on DevOps across various technologies. Lean based value stream analysis and DevOps maturity assessments are used for implementation planning. Platform based approach to DevOps is leveraged to make DevOps available as a service to the teams – ensuring that the platform has re-usable CI-CD pipelines covering multiple technologies (distributed technologies like C#, Java, React, COTS packages like Salesforce and SAP, mobile apps, big data & middleware), with quality & security baked-in. We collaborate with clients in establishing such a platform-based solution as well as leverage our own Infosys DevSecOps Platform (IDP). IDP is an enterprise grade platform that supports seamless integration and scalability on a hybrid cloud ecosystem, supporting modern and legacy applications across multiple technologies. It empowers teams with script-less automation across application, infra and software configuration with prebuilt technology and tools support, templates and policies as well as codified engineering practices and AI/ML driven insights for faster and secure feature releases.
