Implementing a DevOps environment would make SoD behave like “walls” physically partitioning teams. Thus, leading to an increased number of resources only lowering the speed of delivery.
Definitions
- As the name suggests, DevOps is the combination of software development (Dev) and operations (ops), with a focus on cross-departmental integration and automation.
- Segregation of Duty (SoD) in IT delivery translates to implementing roles, permissions, and responsibilities so that one person alone cannot introduce a technology change in a production system without auditable control.
- The software development lifecycle (SDLC) is a framework that development teams use to produce high-quality software in a systematic and cost-effective way. The SDLC methodology is used by both large and small software organizations.
DevOps Environment
Enterprises, today, push to build a culture and environment that fosters rapid progress (increased delivery speed) through process automation and at a reduced cost. The DevOps approach to accelerated SDLC involves trust and collaboration from multiple departments, at play. Also, ensuring compliance and requisite control.
Implementing a DevOps environment would therefore make SoD behave like “walls” physically partitioning teams. This, in practice, leads to an increased number of resources in the discrete domains of development, testing, deployment, and maintenance resources. Thus, slowing down the delivery of the final product.
Hence, an across-enterprise DevOps implementation demands innovation to seamlessly integrate SoD controls in an agile environment.
Blockchain’s inherent features can be easily extended to reinforce the existing and new controls compliant with SoD regulatory requirements.
DevOps practices have been known for the past few decades. However, it has gained prominence in recent times when it was adopted by lead tech organizations. DevOps encapsulates the following features:
- Agile development processes
- Continuous communication between business, development, and IT operations personnel, including the creation of a blended DevOps role (e.g. DevOps artisan)
- Rapid and frequent production releases, more than once on a busy day.
- Employment of modern development tooling combined with automation of testing and production deployments
- Increased heavy use of cloud and virtualized environments
- Access to production systems to troubleshoot and remediate issues
Blockchain
Blockchain is built on the principles drawn from cryptography, game theory, and peer-to-peer networking. This networking technology, similar to world-wide-web (www) enables a decentralized exchange of data. In a broader sense, blockchain is a decentralized database (ledger), which maintains a continuously growing linked list of timestamped and encrypted transaction records organized in blocks, with each block being linked to a previous block, in a chain structure.
Blockchain is inherently
- Decentralized
- Synchronized
- Traceable
- Immutable
- Secure
- Scalable
- Collaborative
- Auditable
- Programmable
With the popularity of cryptocurrency as the first implementation of blockchain technology, most people have some know-how of how blockchain technology may be applied in the context of public network infrastructure, also called “unpermissioned blockchains.”
Also Read: HashCash Tech Vision 2021
The past few years had the industry shift focus more towards privacy and consortium distributed ledgers, commonly referred to as “permissioned blockchains”. The “permissioned blockchains” are typically faster. This is due to the simplified consensus protocols relying on a smaller number of trusted nodes that maintain and validate ledgers’ integrity.
Figure: Unpermissioned and Permissioned Blockchain
HashCash DevOps Services
HashCash assists customers to launch themselves into the next frontier of Continuous Integration, Delivery, Deployment, and DevOps Intelligence. HashCash services comprise Release orchestration, Deployment automation, providing customer assistance with end-to-end Automation, Control, Monitoring, and Insights needed for fast-track software and product delivery. HashCash’s line of services encompass the following:
Intelligent Environment Optimization
HashCash assists organizations to build better infrastructure that is automated (software-driven), highly scalable, available(99.99%), and secure. They provide
- Automated Environment Provisioning
- Continuous Configuration Automation
- Test Data Management
- Auto-Scaling of Servers
- Server State Mismatch Identification & Elimination
- Configuration Mismatch Identification & Elimination
Code Inspection and Integration
HashCash helps with error detection at an early stage while continuously integrating new code to the master branch.
- Continuous Development
- Automated Testing & Versioning
- Source Code Management Tool Automation
- Service Virtualization
Release Orchestration
HashCash team assists organizations deliver and deploy working software in a robust manner, support uninterrupted business, and deliver higher customer value. They offer rapid delivery services across the life cycle that help support applications from digital, consumer-facing systems to large enterprise apps like Oracle and SAP.
- Release Planning, Monitoring, and Automation
- Intuitive analytics dashboards to monitor build, test operations, release packaging, and publishing
Continuous Deployment
HashCash team collaborates with their customers to bring about excellent business outcomes by increasing the frequency of successful product releases while optimizing costs.
DevOps Intelligence
Build dashboards with deep actionable insights into software delivery processes addressing metrics like:
- Release activity trend
- Real-time insights on build performance
- Release schedule
- Release velocity
- Release Portfolio analysis
- Risk analysis – Security, Compliance
- Predict future release cycles’ performance
- Issue tracking
Improvements and Innovation
HashCash provides operational maintenance and customers with 100% visibility on the SLAs and KPIs. Combining industry best practices and strong technology experience, HashCash DevOps CoE employs continuous improvement plans and robust governance frameworks for continuous innovation.
- Dev, Test, Prod environment ops management and optimization
- Analytical Dashboards to track Environment, Infrastructure performance, and other KPIs
Conclusion
SoD policies continue to be an integral part of an organization’s internal controls. These policies are designed in response to controls and regulatory requirements which in turn are designed to prevent fraud and factual misstatements. These regulations enforce controls to be put in place to ensure that no individual enjoys excessive rights to execute transactions across an entire business process without trusted checks and balances.
Also Read: HashCash Consultants is Clutch’s Choice For Top Emerging Global Tech Company
Blockchain technology is well equipped with features to implement DevOps delivery that meets control requirements in business and technology environments of all sizes. The need for a comprehensible, role-driven, documented and automated service delivery process is met when the process is implemented on a blockchain using smart contracts. The enhancement would provide immutable traceability of approved delivery activities.
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