Our path to DoneOps
What pain and experiences led us to start DoneOps
How did we get here?
Software should enable your business, but many companies today find themselves in the IT business regardless of what they started out trying to do - everyone from retail to training companies will need some development effort to make their product or services available to their target audience.
Hiring software developers and creating software is only the first step in this journey. Once the software is developed, it needs to be deployed, secured, and accessible to customers and potential customers. In many smaller companies, all of these steps are done by the software developers.
Best practices in the automation of building software, securing it, and finally, deploying it, are often secondary expertise areas for software developers; software development is a large knowledge domain, and expecting expertise in these other areas can often lead to staff retention issues, security breaches, and less efficiency.
Which tools do you choose? There are so many competing products in the market to achieve similar tasks, and even if you do pick the right tools, how do you ensure you’re getting the best value from them? Tooling choices can create technical debt, which ends up costing much more to resolve in the future. However, if these decisions are made wisely in the early stages of your deployments, the benefits will be reaped for years to come. A partner with experience in various industries and a wealth of experience in various technologies can get you going fast, as well as ensuring that your technology grows with you instead of against you.
We believe that our expertise and experience can get you to this stable and expandable point much faster, and this is a big part of why we founded DoneOps.
Many companies have experienced security breaches leading to exposure of customer data and the associated reputational loss. That’s increasingly accompanied by financial costs with GDPR in Europe and the CCPA in California. But good tools, processes, and controls could have prevented this in many cases. With the average cost of a data breach in 2019 reaching $3.92 million, prevention is most certainly the smart business decision.
Having delivered SOC and ISO attestations, we understood that having some aspects of these baked into the platform from the beginning will result in more secure environments, help you understand your exposure, and enable you to go after business that would be harder to win without these certifications. While there are many consultancies that will work with you to change your processes and platforms to achieve this, we wanted to create a world where this is as painless as possible.
In the longer term, transitioning from an outsourced partner to an internal team will make sense for many firms. And DoneOps’s model allows you to do so. We’ve experienced this pain first hand for many years with the dreaded “vendor lock-in” and it drove us nuts. We were designing systems to rapidly change and evolve but some of the technologies we were using to do so, wanted to lock us into their ecosystem. This ended up making us take paths and solutions we normally wouldn’t have chosen but because we were locked in, it forced our hand.
Even with a small DevOps team, having a partner can still be a sound business decision. Many small teams struggle with burnout as they are often leanly staffed, and this can impact quality and staff retention. They also often have other responsibilities beyond their core DevOps function, and at times important work may not get done in the timeframes you need.
It’s common for DevOps engineers to have to fight fires during the day and make improvements or carry out business-critical tasks outside of normal business hours. This can leave them in a cycle where they’re unable to make the improvements that would provide a more stable environment, so the firefighting increases instead of going down.
Hiring technology specialists is an expensive process and, when you have to do so quickly to replace key people, it can lead to inadvertently lowered standards in new hires just to keep your business running. And in anything but the best-documented environments, new colleagues will still need time to become productive at the same level as the person who departed was.
DoneOps can help with all of this in a number of ways. Our globally distributed team means that it’s always business hours for us somewhere. This reduces fatigue and lets your in-house team have more time to focus on improving any issues instead of just running in place. As Alice in Wonderland perfectly describes, In our country, you’ll definitely get to somewhere else if you run very fast for a long time!
We can also provide your in-house team with a sounding board to discuss plans, solutions, and understand the pros and cons of different technology options. Yes, they could talk to vendors, but vendors generally have a vested interest in steering you towards specific products and services. And it’s often not possible to have a quality detailed discussion on technology forums without violating confidentiality.
A partner with an NDA in place will ensure that your team feels supported and part of something bigger. They’ll have people to run things by with similar experiences, domain expertise, and goals. And as an independent third party, we’ll help select the tools that are right for you, not the ones we make the most profit from. We know the gotchas of upgrading from vX to vY of many tools, we have experience doing it, and we can help your team be successful instead of having to learn things the hard way.
Finally, staff turnover does happen for both good and bad reasons. And when this happens, DoneOps is there. Flexible engagements mean that you can adjust which tasks you manage in-house, and which tasks you want us to own. This means your business continues, you can still take advantage of any upcoming opportunities, but most importantly take the time to find the right next member of your team.
We have lived these problems for years and decided to break the cycle by starting DoneOps. Let DoneOps be your partners on the journey to sustainable DevOps!