IT operations now require more collaboration. Learn the roles of DevOps, NetOps, and NetSecOps and how to encourage them to work together.
Numerous roles facilitate software development in IT operations. While these roles are technically separate, they all contribute greatly to building a strong business environment. Therefore, it is necessary to understand these different roles and harmonize their activities in order to achieve a more holistic and efficient business architecture†
In the era of digital transformation, many actors contribute their expertise to a successful IT operation† Often these roles are accommodated in DevOps, NetOps and NetSecOps. Unfortunately, because of the similarities between the roles, they have been misinterpreted in IT operations.
TO SEE: Tech companies win in digital transformation, but struggle with leadership and governance (TechRepublic)
Insight into IT activities in DevOps, NetOps and NetSecOps
Ideally, successful IT operations are designed to enable the development and operations team to work together in harmony to create, deploy, iterate, and maintain secure applications and services. The IT operations and development team consists of technical management, infrastructure management and quality assurance of finished products.
While DevOps has gained a lot of traction and support in IT operations, the same cannot be said about NetOps and NetSecOps. This trend creates weakness in IT operations and development, leading to slow, unresponsive, and unscalable infrastructure.
Therefore, it is necessary to put DevOps, NetOps and NetSecOps in a practical perspective in IT operations.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a combination of development and operations as one entity in IT operations. It is a concept that puts in perspective the collaboration between developers and system administrators to continuously build, test, deliver and improve applications and services to maintain quality.
For quality results in IT operations, principles such as collaboration, automation, continuous integration (CI), continuous testing, and continuous delivery (CD) build a well-structured DevOps team. In addition, DevOps can also represent the adoption of an iterative software development model, implementation and maintenance of infrastructure in a way that builds cohesion between developers and system administrators and tailors projects to business needs.
What is NetOps?
In any technical infrastructure, network monitoring and troubleshooting cannot be trivialized for the project to succeed. Therefore, NetOps typically represents network operations that revolve around the use of DevOps principles in network assessment and maintenance.
In IT operations, NetOps integrates network automation, virtualization, orchestration, and infrastructure processing as code. By supporting the DevOps team, NetOps builds a more programmable, flexible and scalable network infrastructure. In addition, modern IT operations require the NetOps team to ensure: dynamic multipath optimizationnetwork security, remote access and load balancing.
What is NetSecOps?
NetSecOps refers to integrating automated network security testing into DevOps pipelines for continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD). It is a NetOps subset that emphasizes network security in the development lifecycle. Collaboration between teams working on application development, network security and IT operations is essential to NetSecOps.
NetSecOps can also be seen as a partnership between security operations and the network operations team. This collaboration between the two teams is primarily driven by the widespread adoption of cloud technologies and the quest of business organizations to mitigate cyber risk.
Encouraging collaboration between NetOps, DevOps and NetSecOps in IT operations
With the level of complexity within enterprise IT operations, many business organizations are moving from the traditional silo model of IT operations to a more cohesive and collaborative model.
Some of the factors that should encourage this collaboration are the need for efficiencies in the data infrastructure and multicloud adoption. Other factors include the need to improve cybersecurity and network automation vigilance, improved customer satisfaction, reduced software development costs, continuous product improvement, and faster time to market.
TO SEE: CEOs must shift from ‘tool-first’ to ‘team-first’ thinking to improve collaboration (TechRepublic)
How Enterprises Can Integrate DevOps, NetOps, and NetSecOps
While it can be difficult to combine two or more teams that have typically worked separately for a long time, it is possible. Some issues that can arise in creating synergy between the teams include management issues and conflicting priorities in their respective missions.
However, there are different methods of integrating the three teams. To serve as a guide to how enterprises can synergize these teams, we refer to Gartner’s Four levels of tuning fashion model. This model describes four strategies for improving IT team alignment.
For enterprises looking to create a reliable and practical collaboration between DevOps, NetOps and NetSecOps in IT operations, the following steps can help:
- Each team must be aware of each other’s actions, how they have evolved in relation to overall business objectives and how they will affect the organization as a whole.
- In order for this awareness to drive team activities, each team must have a lead coordinator to oversee this collaboration between the teams.
- Whenever possible, teams should look for tools that can be used across the board to avoid tool proliferation and ensure that every team is working from the same data source.
- To improve security and collaboration, organizations need to invest in collaboration software tools. This measure also makes it easier to track project events across all teams.
