Studies by IDC show that 80% of decision-makers worldwide agree that digital infrastructure is critical for achieving their business goals. As the post-pandemic world continues to explore deeper into the digital economy, enterprises must learn to go beyond their baby steps in digital adoption and pave the way for achieving digital supremacy.
However, progressing towards this goal requires more than just investing in digitizing the operations as much as possible. It also entails ensuring that they are sustainable, reliable, and constantly deliver value to all stakeholders. This is where it becomes important to have a clear idea of how to run your digital infrastructure to suit modern business requirements. For most organizations, this boils down to deciding on which among ITIL 4, DevOps, and SRE they should follow in planning, implementing, and running their digital ecosystem.
Prioritizing one above the rest is quite difficult. To that end, it is essential that organizations understand their differences. Let us have a profound look at each of these operating models based on 3 major areas to arrive at a decision.
ITIL 4, DevOps, & SRE – The Definitions
ITIL 4, or Information Technology Infrastructure Library 4, is a framework that focuses on organizing people and processes to work together towards achieving business value through a high-performing and quality-centric IT service delivery.
DevOps is the practice of aligning the development and operations teams towards a common goal of building and continuously delivering quality software for the business.
Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE focuses on leveraging software engineering principles to solve operational problems to ensure reliability, availability and scalability It usually kicks in after the systems have gone live and is found typically in large systems – driven by an engineering focus.
The Focus Areas
ITIL 4 was designed to enable service teams to be a partner in business growth and success rather than sufficing the traditional role of supporting backend teams. It holds a sharp focus on delivering stakeholder value irrespective of whether they are end users or internal business users. It also focuses heavily on promoting visibility, collaboration, and holistic thinking.
DevOps focuses on delivering software at a high pace to continuously support growth ambitions. While at the same time, it is also a check on production quality and feedback integration in each release.
SRE focuses on the use of automation and software engineering principles to solve operational problems and prevent them from occurring in the first place. It focuses on measuring and improving the reliability of systems, with an emphasis on reducing the time it takes to recover from failures. By measuring everything, it enables data-driven decisions.
Impact on Team Structure
ITIL 4 doesn’t emphasize strongly on team centralization. They can be in multiple teams and work towards meeting service-level objectives of IT systems at different levels of the business. In fact, different teams can follow different metric evaluations for gauging their individual strengths and weaknesses. The only connecting metric would be the service level objectives of the IT system.
The rate of success of DevOps initiatives relies on keeping teams in development and operations always aligned to achieve delivery goals. Teams often work to achieve the same metrics, such as release frequency or time to restore from a fault occurrence.
In SRE, engineering teams are enlisted with the heavy-duty tasks of maintaining applications in their highest capacity with optimal performance. People roles are well defined, and all ownership is assigned with respective service level metrics to different engineers.
The differences in these three approaches may lead to several leaders thinking about using one to replace the other two. However, in reality, the best way for enterprises to achieve success in their large digital initiatives is to have all three approaches existing simultaneously to create a high-performing IT organisation. This will help them in continuously empowering business value creation with reduced risks..
ITIL 4 and DevOps can be brought into adoption in technology projects at any time. On the other hand, SRE can be introduced by inducting a member of the engineering team as part of the DevOps or ITSM team — or even as an independent entry into the organization’s software team if they do not follow DevOps or ITIL 4.
Why Should Enterprises Have an Eye Out for All Three Approaches?
DevOps, ITIL 4, and SRE share a very tight bond in areas like automation. All of these frameworks & methodologies leverages the various software engineering practices & techniques and encourages the use of multiple tools and platforms to automate as many processes as possible to help enterprises save time and improve efficiency. All 3 approaches cater to assisting organizations in mitigating the challenges of change management in different scenarios.
Building a robust digital transformation framework for your business requires a strategic effort from people, processes, and the right technology. Having all of these entities work together collaboratively is a goal that most organizations fail to achieve owing to a lack of knowledge about approaches like ITIL 4, DevOps, and SRE.
Knowing how to configure and leverage the right mix of these 3 approaches to improve service delivery, enhance software quality, and accelerate generation of business value is perhaps the best way to attain digital supremacy for enterprises.
Achieving the right mix for these boils down to your decision to select the right technology partner for managing your digital infrastructure. This is where enreap can bring a significant difference. Get in touch with us to know more.
