Five Best Practices Used to Create Agile IT in the Cloud
Enterprises are leveraging cloud computing like never before to enable agile within their IT departments and software development teams. The companies that have successfully implemented cloud-enabled software development and agile infrastructure tend to have the following five things in common:
They don’t change the agile process to fit their legacy infrastructure; they change their IT strategy to be more agile.
The very essence of the agile model is trust and delegation, and yet some IT organizations are still refusing to operate with these principles in mind. They claim to support the agile development model but require developers to change their model to fit the existing IT architecture. Successful IT organizations are more flexible and work with software development teams to create an IT architecture strategy that is self-service oriented, while still providing visibility and control for IT.
They empower their end-users with self-service environments.
Developers and testers are enabled by the creation of operational templates specific to each development project, setting consumption policies, and providing IT services that developers can consume easily.
They expect rapid change and fast iteration to be the new normal.
Be ready to architect your IT infrastructure to be more configurable, scalable, and flexible. An agile development model is inherently fast paced, so be willing to accommodate change and quickly adapt to what works and what does not. Expect rapid iteration and design accordingly.
They embrace collaboration as the foundation of agile development.
Customers, line-of-business users, QA, and support professionals should be able to collaborate during multiple phases of the development cycle. All of these stakeholders are expected to operate on the application based on the specific roles they play on the team. If the environment cannot be easily replicated and shared across teams, then the developers and testers will not adopt it.
They maintain full visibility and control over IT operations.
Implementing agile infrastructure does not eliminate security and governance needs. IT organizations need to set security policies and enforce them through granular access control. They need to have full visibility into quota usage, resource management, and compliance.
Extending your existing IT architecture to encompass a cloud-enabled development strategy will ultimately serve your agile development team better. The process does not have to be difficult or challenging. In most cases, complex-computing environments can be created in the cloud in just a few minutes or hours—not days or weeks.
Although it is possible to continue using on-premises infrastructure, your agile development process will be much more effective when your IT infrastructure and service delivery model is agile. Given the potential consequences of operating with dated hardware, poor collaboration, and slow provisioning of IT resources, organizations can increase business agility by embracing cloud computing for software development and testing.
