The DevOps philosophy therefore centres on people, process, technology and information.
"With respect to culture, DevOps seeks to change the dynamics in which operations and development teams interact," Wurster adds.
"Key to this change are the issues of trust, honesty and responsibility.
"In essence, the goal is to enable each organisation to see the perspective of the other and to modify behaviour accordingly, while motivating autonomy."
Although people are at the very core of the DevOps philosophy, Wurster claims they are only a portion of the wider equation; continual improvement of the right processes and accurate information at the right time are also necessary to optimize value.
"The overall DevOps message is compelling, because many enterprise IT organisations want to achieve the scale-out and economies of scale achieved by world-class cloud providers," Wurster adds.
"Nevertheless, there are still several gaps that prevent implementation of DevOps as a comprehensive methodology.
"Enterprises have acknowledged these gaps and have begun assessing how the DevOps mindset might apply to their own environments.
"However, culture is not easily or quickly changed. And key to the culture within DevOps is the notion of becoming more agile and changing behavior to support it — a perspective that has not been widely pursued within classical IT operations."
Consequently, Wurster believes organisations with agile development will be slower to embrace DevOps across the entire application life cycle.
Cultural resistance and low levels of process discipline will create significant failure rates for DevOps initiatives, particularly when waterfall processes are still a dominant portion of the development portfolio.
Nevertheless, a majority of enterprises attempting to scale agile over the next five years will recognise the need for DevOps initiatives.