What is NoOps and How Does it Affect Organisations

Shifting IT’s focus from operations to outcomes.

We have reached a point in time where cloud computing has arrived at its next evolution; a point in time where technical resources can now be derived from the underlying systems infrastructure and enabling tool. With the continuous investment in cloud computing, providers have strived past providing just a cloud network, but now through hyper-automation, they are able to take on many core administrative tasks including: patching, backup, and database management among others. Together, these capabilities create a NoOps environment.

But, what is NoOps?

To explain what a NoOps environment is, a general understanding of an organisation is required. In most IT organisations/departments there is a software development team and an IT Operations team. These two teams can work together simultaneously (DevOps) or separately. The software development team build the software and, the operations team focus on its deployment and maintenance. However, a NoOps environment is none of this. NoOps is the concept of an IT environment that has become so automated that there is no need for a dedicated team/department to focus on the management of in-house software.

Through the constant pushing in innovation within cloud computing automation, server-less computing is now possible. In this model, cloud vendors dynamically and automatically allocate the storage and memory based on the needs of the request. In traditional cloud service models, organizations had to design and provision such allocations manually. The end goal of NoOps is to, as previously stated, have an automated IT environment where only small teams are required to maintain it.

Smaller teams also implies the ability for businesses to release resources/talent into other areas of the organisation to focus on outcomes. Traditionally, the CIO’s responsibility of maintaining business-critical technology, has absorbed 70 percent of the IT department’s budget as well as significant amounts of labour bandwidth too. With the NoOps environment, a cheaper, more efficient cloud solutions, CIO’s are now able to reduce operations spending by 20 percent or more.

However, beyond the extent of this article, a gentle warning can be given that; to reach the benefits of NoOps an environment that is fully committed is required to be established.