The need for real digital transformation

Federal Insights

The need for real digital transformation

When it comes to 21st century technology, change has become more of a constant than ever before. It is so perpetual, in fact, private and public companies realize...

Peter Musurlian@PMusurlianWFED

October 13, 2020 5:24 pm

2 min read

Digital Transformation - October 13, 2020

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When it comes to 21^st century technology, change has become more of a constant than ever before. It is so perpetual, in fact, private and public companies realize that “digital transformation” is not an option, but a necessity.

“It’s kind of like a movement,” said Hasan Yasar, technical manager of the Secure Lifecycle Solutions Group at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute CERT Division, on Federal Monthly Insights — Federal Digital Transformation in a Post-Covid World.

”It’s how we are thinking about DevOps, DevSecOps, and Agile. It’s happening in industry as well as in government,” Yasar said.

In the context of a modern engineering approach, Yasar said, that DevOps, DevSecOps, and SRE are the drivers to enable digital transformation, although there is some confusion.

’First of all, to do DevSecOps, we have to have a DevOps mindset in place. We cannot really jump directly to DevSecOps. Unfortunately, we have to have good infrastructure, good automation, and good integration in place. Then we can include the secret element,” Yasar said on Federal Drive with Tom Temin.

Yasar said he has been writing programs for nearly three decades. Since then, things have changed dramatically.

“The difference is now automation is part of the software delivery pipeline. It is not a single instance, it is orchestrated, with various tools and full connection into our environments,” Yasar said.

Today’s technology is supporting multiple applications. Continuous integration serves as an example, as automation is orchestrated and more connected.

“So today, we have the right technology, such as virtualization. We can run many components, many servers together. It is saving a lot of time, Yasar said.

In discussing digital transformation and software development, Agile and DevOps are sometimes used interchangeably.

“They’re not the same. They kind of complement each other. With Agile, we are talking about a more iterative, incremental development, which is more process pieces. It is covering up how to do the business, how to build up the software. It’s not talking about the mechanics, it’s not talking about technical work,” Yasar said.

Yasar also talked about dealing with older programs and when to continue extending the life of legacy technology or when to start over from scratch.

“If I have a system that I have been maintaining and it’s eating up a lot of my time and resources, it’s time to think about that for specific modules and rearchitect it,” Yasar said.