Legacy technology has often been seen as an inevitable barrier to DevOps, but in most enterprises, it will never disappear entirely, and in fact, mainframe technology is growing and remains projected to do so through the rest of this decade. A successful modern enterprise DevOps strategy needs a pragmatic approach to leveraging legacy technology and enhancing it with state-of-the-art ServiceOps technology.
Many BMC customers are large, established enterprises and organizations that have been investing in technology for decades. Nearly all of them have embarked on a DevOps journey, but for many, the impact of these initiatives, while usually very positive, has been limited.
The notion of a fully modernized technology infrastructure might be desirable, but it is an expensive and complex change. It may not be the best short- or long-term business decision to replace every legacy component, particularly if the opportunity cost of that effort reduces the capacity to deliver new, transformative innovations.
This reality has created significant challenges for DevOps, which grew in the first half of the decade in smaller organizations such as start-ups and open-source vendors that tended not to have much legacy technology. In these environments, services are easier to understand and it’s easier to enable rapid, light-touch deployment, compared to a company like a major bank where a simple customer interaction (for example, moving money from one bank to another) may cross many different technology platforms of different ages.
Enterprises are more complicated, so achieving the appropriate balance between the intentionally simplified microservice perspective of a DevOps team and the broader picture of the complex enterprise is more complicated, as well. As a result, organizations frequently lack the confidence and ability to let DevOps break out of small, contained pockets and become a mainstream innovation channel for large, complex, critical services.
This challenge of agile, enterprise-scale DevOps needs to be addressed to achieve higher DevOps maturity. BMC Helix for ServiceOps enables agile, enterprise-scale DevOps in several ways:
- BMC Helix Intelligent Integrations align ServiceOps seamlessly and in real-time directly with the tooling used by the DevOps teams, reducing handoffs and creating shared understanding through collaboration and automation.
- Dynamic service modeling with BMC Helix CMDB enables the organization to discover and understand its services, even as they rapidly evolve across various underlying technologies, old and new.
- BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps applies machine learning and predictive capabilities to deliver an unparalleled understanding of the risk and impact of changes.
- BMC Helix IT Service Management provides rapid, AI-driven insight into change risks, giving the organization greater confidence to enable DevOps while reducing impacts that arise as DevOps-managed services interact with the broader technology environment.
Legacy is not a barrier to innovation; you just need the right toolset to make it part of your modern development efforts.
