Software engineering is changing and DevOps is at the heart of it. An organization's ability to be responsive to the business requires better collaboration, communication, and integration across IT.

There is no doubt that the DevOps movement has gone mainstream. When even IBM and HP are dedicating sites to it there is no longer any question. If we were to place it on the Gartner Hype Cycle even the most devoted proponents would have to admit that it's rapidly approaching the "Peak of Inflated Expectations".

DevOps and its underlying concepts provide undisputed benefits to any forward-thinking organization, and the DevOps toolchain provides mechanisms to realize these benefits.

Companies have responded to cyber attacks with various tools, such as anti-virus, malware, and other endpoint protection, intrusion detection and prevention systems, and others. But despite these additions, data breaches have been increasing steadily over the past five years.

To effectively bolster enterprise defenses against increasingly novel attack mechanisms and intrusion methods, an organization's IT security must be fluid, dynamic, and adaptable - both in protecting disparate IT environments as well as providing ongoing monitoring and assessment against the evolving threat landscape.

According to Cisco's 2015 Annual Security Report, only four in ten IT departments have a coordinated patching strategy in place. The ramifications of this are evident in the rising frequency of enterprise data breaches year-on-year. You've certainly heard it before, but it's worth repeating again: unpatched and out-of-date systems are a leading cause of security incidents.

The transformation of physical networks and infrastructure into easier-to-manage virtualized/software components, hybridization of IT operations and software development roles, and the despecialization of job duties, among others, means that traditional networking roles- and arguably any IT roles with job titles ending with "admin"- will invariably disappear.

The benefits of DevOps are more and more apparent every day. Faster recoveries, higher change success rate, better time to market - it's everything a CIO could want and more. But before you go all-in, you might want to take a minute to learn what makes DevOps initiatives succeed or fail. What are the basic steps you can take now to ensure that DevOps will succeed within your organization?