I don’t need to highlight the impact of the last few years on the world and its businesses. Companies that once completely dismissed the idea of remote working now embrace online offices, with many now operating fully remotely. Externally, the marketplace is shifting too, and opportunities for creating and realizing value can be found in new, less familiar places.

Like every business sector, Financial Services has been on a rollercoaster ride over the past couple of years. The pandemic forced a change in the way businesses work, and the way products and services are delivered to customers. Deloitte summed it up beautifully in the introduction to its ‘Finance 2025 Revisited report’1: “COVID-19 has sped up business innovation and stress-tested the concept of 100% remote work.”

Every enterprise is now facing the same challenge: to do more with less in a demanding economic environment. Releasing value to customers sooner while at the same time controlling the costs of their infrastructures, retaining skilled staff, and reducing risk. With technology now central to the way many enterprises offer, package and deliver their products and services, it has a big part to play here. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella summed it up perfectly in the keynote to Microsoft Inspire 2022 when he said.

I was recently joined for a live webinar by Tony Maddonna (Microsoft Platform Lead, Enterprise Architect & Operations Manager at BMW) and Hamish Watson (DevOps Alchemist at Morph iT) to discuss their experiences with digital transformation and the impact it had on them, their teams and the wider organization.

At the end of last year, we announced that Redgate’s database cloning technology was getting an upgrade: Multi-RDBMS, instance-level clones, and support for containerized workflows. This next generation of database provisioning provides DevOps test data to more teams for fast, quality releases across your software organization. Today, we invite you to join the early access program (EAP) for Redgate Clone.

In this DevOps 101 series, I introduce the concept of DevOps and talk about how you can include the database as a natural partner. In the previous post in the series, I discussed how automation introduces faster and more frequent deployments as a key benefit. We’re now going to take a deep dive into the value you can unlock through frequent deployments using database DevOps, along with how you get started doing them.

At the end of 2021, we published a blog post about the Autumn budget in the UK, what it meant for IT teams in the NHS, and why data management should be prioritised. We looked specifically at four key areas for sharing, monitoring, protecting, and accessing data that we believe are crucial elements of the digital transformation journey. Digital transformation is part of the NHS Long Term Plan, a wide-ranging programme to upgrade technology and digitally-enabled care across the NHS.

This is the fifth part in the DevOps 101 series and it’s time to talk about automation. Before we get into it, I just want to recap what DevOps is. Microsoft’s Donovan Brown sums it up nicely in a single sentence: DevOps is the union of people, process, and products to enable continuous delivery of value to our end users. The important thing to remember here is the order in which he talks: people, process, and products. That’s the way DevOps works.