The high number of respondents to the survey – over 3,000 IT professionals took part in this, its fifth year – provides an opportunity to uncover insights at a sector level and compare those to the average across all businesses and organisations.
The Technology sector is a standout which, in a year of disruption and change for every business, saw 69% of those in the sector reporting growth above or in line with expectations, compared to 55% across other sectors.
The pandemic highlighted the importance of technology to business continuity, with many organisations and companies adapting their business model to serve customers remotely and in different ways, often turning to technology to spearhead the change.
The Technology sector was well prepared with, for example, DevOps adoption rates at 85% compared to 74% elsewhere, and 66% hosting their database mostly or all in the cloud, as against 58% in other sectors.
This increased use of DevOps is demonstrated in the higher take-up of automation in the development process, with Technology businesses ahead of every other in their use of version control, and automated builds, unit tests and deployments.
There is a caveat, however. While 21% of Technology businesses release database changes once a day or multiple times a day compared to 15% across all sectors, 75% of respondents in the sector also state that up to 10% of their deployments require hotfixes compared to 73% across other sectors. In other words, the need to release changes faster appears to be contributing to more of those releases needing hotfixes, despite the processes and tools being better understood and utilized.
The survey from Redgate shows that Technology businesses have recognised this and are now focusing their efforts on addressing three major challenges when integrating database changes into a DevOps process: synchronising application and database changes; overcoming different development approaches; and ensuring business-critical data is preserved and protected.
A full analysis of the areas where the Technology sector is ahead in its journey to DevOps, and those which need further work is available in a new whitepaper at redgate.com/Technology.