This is the third part of my DevOps 101 series, so before we get going, let’s do a quick recap of what we’ve covered previously In DevOps 101: What, who, why, and how, I talked about how the definition from Microsoft’s Donovan Brown encapsulates DevOps succinctly as: The union of people, process, and products, to enable the continuous delivery of value to the end users.

Development teams are under increasing pressure to keep up with the demand for faster delivery of database changes, while ensuring code quality isn’t compromised. This pressure comes from both business requirements and industry expectations. The 2021 Accelerate State of Database DevOps report reveals that the number of teams who are elite performers is increasing year-on-year (making up 26% of those in the study) and these teams have more frequent code deployments and a lower change failure rate.

The desire to release features faster and deliver value to customers sooner is prompting many IT teams to adopt DevOps and Agile practices. By automating parts of the development process where possible and working in shorter cycles to release small changes more often, those teams that do well experience fewer errors and produce higher quality code. All of which is good news, until it comes to the database.

Data masking is a technique of hiding sensitive data from certain users who should not be able to view or access the actual values. This post will look at the reasons why you might choose to implement data masking and discuss both dynamic and static data masking techniques, and when it is appropriate to use each of these.

In the first part of my DevOps 101 series, we tackled the fundamentals of What, who why and how. In this follow-up, I’m going to focus on how to gain buy-in across your organization. That said, who do you need buy-in from? DevOps is the union of people, processes and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users, according to Microsoft’s Donovan Brown. That’s a good explanation, because the focus is not on tooling, or processes, or even just people.

A Contract Solutions Architect for a manufacturing software development company, Tonie Huizer has 20+ years’ experience working with Azure, SQL and other Microsoft technologies. A Microsoft Certified Azure Developer Associate, he has the knowledge to design, build, test, and maintain cloud applications and services on Microsoft Azure.