Celent has released a new report titled Building Your DevOps Chops: A New IT Approach Aimed at Faster/Better/Cheaper. The report was written by Craig Beattie, a senior analyst with Celent’s Insurance practice.

DevOps is a different way of thinking about how to deliver and maintain IT services. It presents an intriguing proposition: Rethink all the processes and tools used to get systems up and running, such that you can achieve the desired result in a fraction of the time. DevOps is both the merging of the software development discipline with IT operations and leveraging automation to increase quality and speed. A range of tools are available now as open source solutions and vendor packages.

In a recent survey Celent asked vendors of insurer software how they were leveraging some of these techniques. Over 75% of vendors in our recent PAS survey (n=80+) indicated that they had some sort of DevOps ability to provide to insurers. DevOps is for insurers that are comfortable making a significant investment into automating, building, and testing these tools. Insurers that do not have high speed to market or are comfortable with manual testing and minimal investing may not reap the value of DevOps. However, most insurers have already adopted some of the practices.

“As with any new tool or approach, there is a cost to adoption,” says Beattie. “Insurers have already started on the journey, and there are great benefits to be gained from adoption, but insurers should consider their own speed requirements and IT challenges before determining their level of investment.”