More than a third of UK firms are spending £1m or more on DevOps per year

And 77 per cent of UK companies have introduced dedicated budgets and support teams for DevOps

More than a third (35 per cent) of UK organisations are spending £1m or more on DevOps per year, a new report has found.

The 2015 State of DevOps Report, conducted by Vanson Bourne for "data-as-a-service" firm Delphix, found that DevOps was becoming increasingly prevalent in UK organisations - with 77 per cent having introduced dedicated budgets and support teams for DevOps.

The term DevOps refers to the integration of the roles of developers, who build and test IT services, and the teams that are responsible for deploying and maintaining IT operations. Only recently has the concept gained widespread acceptance, having previously been regarded as just another IT buzzword.

A 2013, a CA Technologies poll found that 45 respondents didn't know what DevOps was, and another 17 per cent thought it was all hype. Just last year, nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of IT decision makers claimed that they were not familiar with the term. Slowly, it seems, IT leaders are getting to grips with DevOps, with Gartner believing DevOps will become mainstream next year.

According to the Delphix study, 59 per cent of respondents believe that DevOps is somewhat strongly defined. However, there is a disagreement over whether the development side (28 per cent), the operations side (22 per cent) or both combined (50 per cent) share the responsibility for DevOps initiatives and how those are defined. In some cases, IT professionals believe DevOps can have multiple definitions.

Nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) of respondents believe that DevOps can be defined as "developers and system administrators collaborating to ease the transition between development and production", while 57 per cent said that it could mean "evolving operations to meet the demands of agile software development teams".

The Delphix study found that on average, organisations had started seven DevOps initiatives in the past two years, with this figure set to rise to nine in the next 24 months as DevOps initiatives become standardised.

More than half (52 per cent) of businesses said they had three teams with some DevOps responsibility, while the remaining 48 per cent had an average of five dedicated DevOps groups.

Meanwhile, Delphix suggested that the success of DevOps is measured by the number of defects found in the software development lifecycle, with 57 per cent agreeing that teams would spend less time recoding if defects were identified earlier.

Over half the businesses (56 per cent) currently identify defects or issues either once the application has been deployed to production or during QA (quality assurance) and validation, when it takes approximately five days to resolve.

"Reducing this time has a substantial impact on efficiency and effectiveness as teams spend less time recoding when defects are identified earlier in the development lifecycle," Delphix claimed.

The most implemented DevOps initiatives included virtual databases (43 per cent), agile data masking (38 per cent) and continuous deployment (36 per cent). The survey's results suggested that organisations with a commitment to DevOps require full production data for both QA and development activities. However, nearly half (46 per cent) of teams admit that they experience delays waiting for testing and development data environments, with just eight per cent able to reset the test environment within 10 minutes.

Delphix suggested that because many of these initiatives have data issues that only allow limited testing, DevOps practitioners are working around data security constraints and taking shortcuts with production data in non-production testing environments. Overall, 40 per cent of those surveyed admitted that developers and QA personnel are granted unaudited access to production data - which could compromise data security.