Kendra Little

11 February 2020

Enterprise insights from the 2020 State of Database DevOps Report

In this post I’d like to share some insights specific to Enterprises, which we define as organizations with 1,000 or more employees in the 2020 State of Database DevOps Report. We received over 2,000 responses to the report this year and, of those respondents who reported the size of their organization, 41% came from Enterprises.

Enterprises are investing in DevOps

It’s difficult for us to make sweeping claims about overall DevOps adoption rates – because our survey has ‘DevOps’ in the title, this likely means that our respondents are more biased towards interest in DevOps than the general population. However, we see some interesting trends in our data:

When looking at the report data, I was impressed to see that 17% of respondents in Enterprises reported that DevOps has been adopted across all projects in their organization – an impressive metric that shows DevOps is not only spreading, but is being fully adopted even by larger organizations.

I was also surprised to see that adoption rates were higher from respondents in Enterprises than from those in small organizations: 72% of those in Enterprises reported some level of DevOps experimentation or adoption for their organization, compared with 66% of those in non-Enterprises.

Making a business case in an Enterprise

Respondents in Enterprises were notably more likely to cite lack of alignment between development and operations as a top concern, compared to respondents in smaller organizations. Additionally, the ability to quickly respond to changing business requirements is a more significant motivation in these larger organizations. Being aware of top concerns as well as this difference may help you make a more persuasive business case for implementing change in an Enterprise.

Respondents in Enterprises were also somewhat more likely to report involvement of a DevOps Engineer/ Consultant in the decision-making process for implementing database DevOps, and slightly less likely to report involvement of Developers, as compared to non-Enterprises.

Enterprises lag behind in some areas

I was surprised to find that our data shows that Enterprises are less likely to mask/de-identify datasets used in the development process as compared to smaller organizations, putting them at greater risk of breaches.

Similarly, although one might think that Enterprises would be more likely to have resources to support dedicated development environments, Enterprises lag behind. Only 26% of respondents in Enterprises report using dedicated database environments for their most business-critical database, whereas 32% in non-Enterprises have adopted this practice.

While it would seem more likely for a larger organization to invest in technology to reduce the risk of data breaches and efficiently support lightweight dedicated development environments, this potentially shows the impact of silos between different teams, or a problem in awareness of current risks and how development practices could be improved in large organizations.

Enterprise practices

25% of respondents in Enterprises reported that their team has dedicated database developers, as compared to 19% in smaller organizations.

Respondents in Enterprises were also more likely to report a larger team working on a single database codebase. 11% of Enterprise respondents report more than 20 people working on a single database’s codebase on average, compared to 6.5% for non-Enterprises. Respondents in smaller teams generally reported lower rates of deployments requiring hotfixes, indicating the complexity of working on an active large database codebase.

We found that respondents working with larger development teams and Enterprises are more likely to use a Change Approval Board. When it comes to rollback plans, respondents in Enterprises are notably more likely to use a prepared rollback/down script (27%) when compared to those in smaller organizations (17%). Enterprise respondents were also less likely than non-Enterprise respondents to use a roll-forward approach (26% vs 31%).

Read the report for more insights

The facts mentioned here are just the beginning: grab your copy of the 2020 State of Database DevOps Report for much more information on insights by company size, industry sector, and more.