As organizations increasingly rely on software development for business revenue, digital immunity has become a top priority. DevOps pros need software delivery practices that bring security and resilience to deliver high-quality software.
Why organizations are turning to software development to deliver business value
Digital immunity has emerged as a strategic priority for organizations striving to create secure software development that delivers business value.
Organizations have increasingly turned to software development to gain a competitive edge, innovate, and enable more efficient operations.
At the same time, the increasing role of software development in business revenue brings the importance of high-quality, secure and user-friendly software front and center.
According to one statistic, 76% of digital teams are responsible for delivering revenue, so software reliability and scalability are an increasing focus as these teams contribute to the bottom line.
As a result, many organizations have turned to DevOps (the alignment of development and operations teams) and DevSecOps (the alignment of development, security, and operations teams) methodologies to enable more efficient and high-quality software development. Bringing development, security, and operations teams together enables teams to identify errors sooner and advance their digital immunity.
What is digital immunity?
Digital immunity is an approach to software development that results in secure and resilient software applications and promotes a positive user experience.
This methodology combines software design, development, automation, operations, and analytics to boost customer experience, increase application security, and reduce downtime that affects business outcomes.
Software development success no longer means just meeting project deadlines. Today, software development teams are responsible for delivering applications that are secure, high performing, and user-friendly.
The five elements of digital immunity
According to Dynatrace research, 89% of CIOs said digital transformation accelerated over the course of 2020, and 58% predicted it will continue to speed up. The increased pace of business has correspondingly accelerated the pace of software development. In another survey, for example, 85% of respondents said their organizations have increasingly shifted toward creating digital experiences. This shift often requires more frequent software releases with built-in measures that ensure a strong digital immune system.
According to Gartner Inc., building software that is secure, resilient, and high-quality involves the following:
- Observability. The ability to measure a system’s current state based on the data it generates. With modern observability, IT teams gain insight into infrastructure and application performance and can quickly identify the root cause of problems. With logs, metrics, traces, as well as user data and context, a modern observability platform can identify an issue or anomaly and, in some cases, automatically address the issue.
- Autonomous testing. As teams develop software more quickly, they can’t rely on manual methods to test applications. Today, software development teams use artificial intelligence (AI) to conduct software testing so they can eliminate human intervention.
- Chaos engineering. Development teams purposely introduce failure on distributed applications to identify software vulnerabilities and points of failure.
- Auto-remediation. A software system or ecosystem is equipped to monitor itself and correct issues automatically without requiring human intervention. Self-healing and auto-remediation become increasingly important as cloud environments grow and interdependencies between systems multiply.
- Application security. The more distributed the architecture, the greater the risk of exposing vulnerabilities in the software supply chain. Continuous runtime vulnerability analysis, runtime application protection, and AI-driven risk assessment, combined with strong version-control policies, protect codebase integrity and manage vendor risk throughout the software delivery lifecycle.
Other than observability, digital immunity relies on AI-assisted shift-left and shift-right testing, chaos engineering, automated problem remediation, and software supply chain security.
Why digital immunity is essential to software development
As companies continue to digitize and rely on cloud environments, applications built with digital immunity will be key for creating positive digital experiences.
With a focus on user satisfaction and software quality, software development teams need to embrace a culture of continuous improvement rather than a project-centric approach that focuses only on completing deadlines.
How to achieve digital immunity with a unified data platform
The Dynatrace modern observability platform enables DevOps teams to develop a digitally immune system using a unified data platform. With end-to-end observability, teams can monitor issues in software development as well as during production. Teams can also identify issues for users through digital experience monitoring.
The Dynatrace Cloud Automation module enables teams to orchestrate toolchains, auto-remediate issues in development and production, and fully automate the DevOps lifecycle.
Further, Dynatrace Application Security provides runtime application protection and vulnerability analysis to help teams integrate security into their DevOps workflows. With contextualized log auditing and forensics on a massive scale, Dynatrace uses AI to instantly prioritize security events—all while meeting service-level objectives and reducing downtime.
Ultimately, a unified automated platform approach enables organizations to achieve digital immunity while simplifying their DevSecOps practices.
To see how Dynatrace integrates with DevSecOps toolchains to automate software releases, join us for the performance clinic “Risk-free delivery with Dynatrace Cloud Automation Release Management.”
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