The Business Benefits of GitOps in Healthcare

It’s not hyperbole to say that application development and delivery are the fuel propelling digital transformation forward for most businesses sectors, including healthcare. Today’s healthcare IT/software and services companies efficiently run on that fuel. It is their ability to refine and improve AppDev and DevOps that enables healthcare organizations to:

• Deliver better service
• Lower cost
• Improved operations/healthcare outcomes
• Ensure their survival and growth in a competitive and vital sector.

This list from the Healthcare IT Skills website provides just a small glimpse into the breadth, diversity, and competitive field of these healthcare services and solutions companies. The ability to deliver application services and updates faster and more efficiently is a fundamental need for many of these companies and thousands of other sectors, which is where GitOps comes in.

Something often seen especially in healthcare IT/software and services companies is the process of GitOps, which is essentially a version of CI/CD on top of declarative infrastructure.

The GitOps operational framework takes the best practices from DevOps for application development, including:

• Version control
• Collaboration
• Compliance
• CI/CD

GitOps is seen as an evolved form of DevOps and is a practice that uses Git as the single source of truth. The principles behind GitOps can apply to various kinds of infrastructure automation, like VMs and containers, among others. It’s particularly effective for managing Kubernetes-based infrastructure because it’s based on the following principles:

• Declarative system definition for everythingCanonical desired system state lives in Git
• System changes are applied automatically
• Software agents manage state drift

GitOps principles and practices declare and view everything as code, whether that be infrastructure as code, configurations, or operations. GitOps uses the Git open-source distributed code management and version control system to define and control the DevOps workflow and synchronization across systems. Git workflow makes it easier for operations and development teams to use Git pull requests for managing infrastructure provisioning and software deployment.

The Benefits of GitOps for Healthcare and Other Sectors

The aim of GitOps is that no matter what we do, it’s all documented and stored in a Git repository. Adopting this approach across the industry has taken a long time and is still in early adoption phases for many. But since developers are checking code, why not operations? GitOps essentially takes that leap of forcing system operators and people who do more on the DevOps side to leverage Git in source code repositories for everything they do.

That enables you to get things like code reviews on your changes. That becomes possible with GitOps, which uses a Git workflow with CI/CD to automate infrastructure updates. Merging new code enables the CI/CD pipeline to make the change in the environment. GitOps makes it possible to manage the drift state of your applications, so you know what your desired state is of what you want versus what is actual.

Understanding and Handling Drift State in Applications with GitOps

The idea of what drift is and how it works within applications is something IT leaders should explain to business stakeholders. As time goes by, businesses such as healthcare IT/software services providers and others that run on applications must constantly modify them and the underlying app infrastructure. This is imperative to improving the products and services they provide to clients and customers.

The app improvements can be for internal-facing apps for the business’s end users to make operational improvements or customer facing improvements on apps that deliver services to external customers and clients. These constant modifications and changes alter the configuration of the applications and infrastructure in ways that can be benign or in ways that alter the smooth operational state of the application, which we call drift.

Getting Things Done with Software agents and Automation via GitOps

GitOps enables these businesses to reach a delta between the desired state of the application and what is actually happening. GitOps principles call for developers and operators to set up a software agent, for instance, that will automatically monitor that drift.

The moment the application state gets too far out of line with the desired state, it can be killed and the process is started to rebuild the environment. The result is that as configuration drift occurs (like manual changes or errors), GitOps automation overwrites them to ensure the environment converges on the Git-defined desired state.

This allows developers to get changes automatically into the system because you now have a repository of your change where it is committed and immutable and cannot be deleted. The result is an ability for authorized users in the DevOps chain to do the following with changes:

• Review
• Authorize
• Approve

The system will then automatically read it, rebuild it, and apply the changes into the system. If you’re a CTO, IT manager, or part of the development or operations team, the benefits of GitOps may or may not be clear. Let’s look more closely at those benefits to understand why both business and IT should care about enacting GitOps.

Why Should IT and Business Care About GitOps?

Whether it’s healthcare, finance, retail, or any of a long list of sectors, there are several reasons IT (developers, operators) and business leaders should care about GitOps. The first reason is that it increases productivity, which:

• Enables a quicker time to market with the deployment
• Makes the business more competitive
• Gives IT and DevOps teams an enhanced developer and operator experience where they can devote more time to writing code, innovating, and improving infrastructure

DevOps teams (and the business in terms of efficient and flawless operational and application use) want to focus on what a container makes up rather than the artifact at the end. The goal is for developers and operations teams to focus on pushing code and not pushing containers.

GitOps enables DevOps teams to have a history of everything that has ever been done via the audit log of all the changes, so everyone knows what is living out there. They can then use it for compliance, like SOC2, HIPAA, or many regulatory compliance needs. That’s because they can now go back and look through all the changes that they have ever made through the system.

There is also much higher system reliability because GitOps provides a single source of truth for everything that they have changed. The DevOps teams and the business also have stronger security guardrails where they can back up through cryptography and track the changes that are made. A review of the major advantages of GitOps includes:

• Increased productivity by streamlining continuous delivery and deployment
• Greater reliability through revert/rollback and fork features
• Workflow standardization around Git
• Organizations can use a single set of tools
• Fewer variables in infrastructure management
• Greater AppDev and infrastructure visibility
• Reduced attack surfaces

While this gives us an ideal solution across many business sectors, it is especially true for the healthcare space. GitOps enables a sea change in the way IT development and operations work by taking DevOps efficiency to the next level.

But applying GitOps is a major change for developers, operators, and the business. That’s why IT leaders can maximize GitOps opportunities by showing business stakeholders how it directly benefits business opportunities and outcomes.

The Business Outcome Benefits of GitOps

CTOs can see the benefits of GitOps for application development and CI/CD pipeline improvement. It’s important that business-oriented stakeholders see the GitOps benefits in terms of business outcomes.

Despite a more general focus on healthcare IT/software services and solution providers, GitOps can have big business and operational benefits for a wide variety of startups and enterprises across sectors. This is true for any entity where application delivery and support are foundational to operations, customer service, or support services.

Faster and Efficient Application updates for Better Service Means Growing Client/Customer Lists

With healthcare solutions providers, their customer- or client-facing applications will have hundreds of client health care organizations (HCO) using and relying on their applications suite. These HCOs are using these solutions to manage operational and or healthcare services for tens of thousands of patients.

Many of these solution providers are delivering a healthcare service to tens of thousands of customers directly. Two examples of these scenarios would be a healthcare insurance provider or a subscription-based healthcare tracking application.

Application updates that improve the service, fix bugs, or add new services are the lifeblood of these organizations where large developer teams may be scattered across the globe. These entities may make hundreds of changes a day with the operations side needing to do the same. Implementing GitOps across these organizations ensures that these updates and changes happen faster across the application and the associated infrastructure. This has the following benefits for the business:

• Using automation and agents frees developers to write code rather than track and implement changes successfully.
• They can always assure clients and customers of the latest application updates and services in real time, so there is no lag in the services they provide to HCOs, their patients, and application customers.
• This goes directly to the bottom line and the ability to remain out front competitively

Application and infrastructure security are always a top priority for entities that have internal and customer-facing apps that transmit a lot of private data. GitOps brings big business benefits to security that protects the business, its customers/clients, and its ability to compete.

GitOps for Stronger Application Security

For healthcare solutions providers (but also any entity or sector where security, regulatory requirements and audits drive the AppDev and application stack), changing access permissions and adaptive security protocols are vital. GitOps provides the means to establish a security approach where teams can automatically track and implement permissions, access, and compliance assurance changes as a single source of truth.

This means meeting regulatory needs of hundreds of developer and operator access permissions and meeting compliance requests for thousands of users can become an automated process. It ensures HIPAA, PCI, GDPR, CCPA, and a host of other regulatory needs changes are met in real time across applications across the CI/CD pipeline and infrastructure to maintain a single source of truth.

Although the benefits of implementing GitOps are many and varied, it’s no simple feat to implement it successfully. As more organizations understand the benefits of GitOps, it is emerging as the evolution of DevOps and how all businesses should go and will go in the future.

More CTOs across healthcare IT/software and services companies and other sectors are enlisting the support of managed cloud services providers to help consult on GitOps implementation within their organization. When startups to enterprises gain a solid understanding of GitOps and have support in implementing it and sing it, they set the pace as leading competitors in the next stage of digital transformation.

To learn more about how Techolution can support your GitOps transformation click here.

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