Enhancing Efficiency and Innovation: The Strategic Advantage of Outsourcing DevOps

In the United States, your average DevOps engineer will make anything from $130k a year (roughly £101k / annum). While that figure can be substantially lower on this side of the pond (~£70k per annum), it still is a sizable amount of money not all businesses can afford. That’s just the people part of the DevOps expenses pie. Outsourcing DevOps makes sense if there isn’t a lot of budget to work with, or where hiring permanent staff may not be practical (e.g. for the duration of a project).

I mention budget because DevOps isn’t just about hiring the skill set. The other major piece of the DevOps expenses pie is the tools needed to get the job done. Given that your average DevOps typically needs to be skilled in programming, operations, and security, the tools needed are as varied and categorised into developer, automation, and security tools.  While typically only 20% of the entire DevOps spend (depending on your setup), DevOps tools are still a significant expense.

New to DevOps? A Quick Definition

DevOps is an approach that integrates software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). DevOps seeks to shorten the development life cycle and provide continuous delivery (e.g. rapid product improvement) with high software quality. By fostering a culture of continuous improvement, DevOps helps organisations respond more rapidly to market changes, enhance customer satisfaction, and achieve a competitive advantage.

It emphasises collaboration between development and operations teams, automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. DevOps practices include continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD), automated testing, and infrastructure as code (IaC).

DevOps supports a seamless and efficient workflow, works to reduce silos, minimise errors, and improves the time to market for new features and fixes. Through DevOps, companies can maintain stability while innovating, ensuring that their products and services meet user demands and maintain high-quality standards.

Why Outsource DevOps?

While budget preservation is a major consideration for many organisations, it’s not the only reason. In Atlassian’s 2020 DevOps Trends survey, 99 percent of respondents reported that DevOps had a positive effect on their organisations. These positive effects include faster and more efficient software releases, better team efficiency, and improved product quality. Other benefits include:

Skills availability

According to Mat Knutton, Head of Permanent Technology Recruitment at Robert Walters Manchester, now is the best time to dive into DevOps (if you have the technical chops) due to a longstanding shortage of skills in the discipline.

“It is now more difficult than ever to source top talent. Demand for DevOps professionals far outstretching supply with approximately only 25,000 to 30,000 currently working in the UK. DevOps Engineers are currently a highly sought-after commodity.”

Since DevOps typically requires experience in programming, operations, and security, it’s not a skill set that can be picked up overnight. This makes it both time-consuming and expensive for businesses to pursue in-house DevOps training programs. Here too outsourcing DevOps can play a collaborative role working in parallel with in-house DevOps trainees.

Expertise and efficiency

The experience provided by DevOps service providers holds another benefit for its clients. And experience is important – according to the DORA 2019 State of DevOps report, experienced DevOps teams can speed up deployment significantly.

One key benefit of DevOps service providers is the varied exposure and experience they accumulate as they take on new clients and solve unique problems. This often results in a pool of expertise that lends itself to clients and benefits clients with faster and more efficient problem-solving. This has a knock-on effect which allows the client to use less of its resources (including time) to address these issues, and therefore allows more space for normal day-to-day and / or mission-critical operations.

This expertise can be scaled based on demand and negates the need to hire new staff or let go of existing staff.

Improved output

According to the same Atlassian survey mentioned above, 61% of respondents said that DevOps has improved the quality of their output, while 49% said that it improved their time to market and deployment efficiency.

With their own existing frameworks, tools, and processes service providers come equipped to handle continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, infrastructure management, and automated testing. Where they also employ rigorous quality assurance processes, outsourcing can help speed up the development cycle and help deliver higher quality deployments. All this coupled with continuous 24/7 monitoring and alerting leads to higher quality output, less downtime, and overall reliability.

What To Do Next

Outsourcing your DevOps needs is more than a solution to budget preservation and shoring up any potential skills gaps in your organisation. Implementing DevOps is about continuous improvement while enabling your organisation to stay agile and giving you the space and time to respond more effectively to market demands. In the fast-paced digital economy, outsourcing DevOps is not just a cost consideration—it’s a critical component of sustainable, competitive growth.