Gartner Hype Cycle: what is it and its perspective on DevOps TDM for 2024

The Gartner Hype Cycle has become a staple in the tech industries. In a context where emerging trends and disruptive innovation are the norm, the Gartner Hype cycle represents an effort to help professionals filter out noise and recognize the true potential of emerging trends. 

Gartner’s ‘Hype Cycle Operational Models, 2024’ offers an in-depth look at aspects to be considered when looking at optimizing operational models. Recognizing the key importance of operational models to fulfill any organization's strategic goals, it analyzes the maturity of up-and-coming movements and technologies in the field, offering key insights for companies to make informed decisions. A text that also includes crucial insights on the perspective of Gartner on Devops and the current role of Test Data Management (TDM) as a resource for on-demand, efficient, safe and compliant data management for DevOps. 

Included as a sample vendor for DevOps Test Data Management, at icaria Technology we share some of the tips for understanding the Gartner Hype Cycle and how to apply it for informed decisions, with a focus on the Gartner Hype Cycle Devops TDM perspective.

Gartner Hype Cycle: understanding the basics

What is the Gartner Hype Cycle Model?

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a tool for companies aiming at understanding the maturity and adoption of emerging technologies. It’s thus designed to help companies gauge their potential impact and adjust their investments and strategic planning around this information.

To achieve this, the Gartner Hype Cycle offers a visual framework that illustrates the maturity of emerging technologies, categorizing them into five distinct phases. This classification aims at providing a look at how emerging technologies may evolve over time, with the expectation that such a framework can help organizations assess the current stage of technological advancements and manage expectations and decisions accordingly.

Behind the Gartner Hype Cycle is the leading global research and advisory firm Gartner, which provides insights and tools to help businesses make informed decisions, especially in technology-related fields.

What are the 5 stages of the Gartner Hype Cycle?

• Innovation Trigger: this stage is characterized by the excitement surrounding a new technology's potential. Typically, the innovation has sparked media interest and early proof-of-concept stories, but there is a lack of substantial evidence of the innovation’s real-world applications.
  
• Peak of Inflated Expectations: early publicity means a few success stories emerge, accompanied by a large number of stories of failures linked to the innovation. At this stage, some companies take steps to capitalize on the hype, but most decide not to take any action, as the potential advancement itself and its impact is still mostly unknown. 
• Trough of Disillusionment: after initial enthusiasm fades due to early experiments falling short of expectations, an important turning point arrives: only the companies that enhance their products to meet the needs of early adopters survive. This process results in important refinements and improvements in the technology, which opens the door to the next stage in the Gartner Hype Cycle.
• Slope of Enlightenment: technologies that reach this stage are new and improved (in their second or third generation) and their benefits for businesses begin to become clearer and more widely recognized. While the more cautious companies continue to hesitate, more organizations begin funding pilot programs seeking to solve their needs through this new innovation.
• Plateau of Productivity: at this stage, the technology's value and its relevance in the market are evident. This stirs its widespread adoption, which begins to grow and gain momentum. As more is understood about the technology, it’s also easier to assess provider viability.

How to apply the Gartner Hype Cycle

The Gartner Hype Cycle is a valuable tool for companies looking to identify technologies that are relevant to their businesses’ current needs, goals and challenges.

As such, it represents a resource to have a closer look and understand certain emerging technologies; information that must then be evaluated in light of the organization's own risk tolerance.

At the same time, it’s important to contrast information obtained through the Gartner Hype Cycle model. Academic studies, industry reports and expert analysis can all provide further insights into new emerging technologies and accompany the intelligence obtained through the Gartner Hype Cycle.

The Gartner Hype Cycle view on DevOps TDM

The ‘Hype Cycle Operational Models, 2024’ published by Gartner delivers important perspectives on emerging trends in operational models. 

Targeting Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders, it aims at providing organizations with key understandings about trends within operational models and IT infrastructure, in order to enable informed decision-making and efficient and secure IT systems.

The 92-page document is packed with valuable insights for strategizing and developing efficient operation models today and thus access the cascading benefits of this optimization. As such, it mentions and categorizes almost 30 technological advancements and trends within the Gartner IT Operations Maturity Model.

Gartner Hype Cycle includes DevOps Test Data Management within this context, offering specialist insights through an analysis by Andrew Bales and Ross Power. 

The document first defines DevOps test data management (TDM), which provides a structured framework for supplying development teams with sanitized data, meaning data that has been anonymized, masked, or, in some cases, virtualized. 

This data facilitates the replication of production conditions in a controlled environment so as not to compromise the privacy or security of real data. All while enabling the evaluation of the performance, functionality, and security of applications.

Why TDM is gaining importance?

The report moves on to analyze the importance of DevOps TDM as an alternative to conventional data practices: “As organizations shift to DevOps and the pace of development increases, [the] traditional approach [of copying data for use in test environments] is increasingly at odds with the requirements for efficiency, privacy and security, and the increased complexity of modern applications. This exposes organizations to a variety of legal, security and operational risks.”

While evaluating the impact of implementing Test Data Management for DevOps, the Gartner document highlights the increasing importance of compliance and privacy when provisioning test data. It then moves on to describe the role of TDM in doing so and consequently reducing the risk of “costs imposed by regulatory fines, remediation, mitigation and inevitable delays associated with audits and investigations” as well as reducing the risk of data breaches.

The report continues emphasizing how increasing data privacy requirements “have prompted organizations to revisit and update their processes with an eye toward scalability and automation.” So has the growing complexity of modern technology and applications and the associated testing protocols, which calls for capacities for coordination and synchronization across different data stores.

The evolving maturity of TDM form the Gartner Hype Cycle perspective

When considering TDM within the Gartner Hype Cycle, the report claims “TDM is generally viewed as a mature, relatively uncomplicated practice.” However, they also recognize “traditional TDM has been inconsistently adopted, with many organizations either simply using copies of production data in unsafe environments or generating “dummy data” (...) that doesn’t accurately reflect production data.” Practices that are not aligned with current privacy and security requirements.

When looking at the potential obstacles that are delaying the progress of TDM, a few reasons emerge: from the fact that many organizations lack a clear classification of sensitive data; to those which haven’t optimized their data masking processes and relational integrity analysis.

A series of challenges that have led TDM in DevOps to be currently located in the "Trough of disillusionment," a stage where initial expectations have not been fully met. This implies that the peak of inflated expectations has already been surpassed. Vendors that have managed to move beyond this peak have successfully developed solutions and features that address the current needs of organizations.

However, according to Gartner Hype Cycle, it is expected that within the next 2 to 5 years, this technology will reach the "Plateau of productivity," at which point its functionalities and benefits will be further strengthened. A larger number of companies can be predicted to integrate TDM into their development practices, employing advanced tools and more robust processes to manage test data. In this stage of maturity, TDM in DevOps will have an even more positive impact on regulatory compliance, software quality, and development team efficiency.

It is worth highlighting that icaria TDM has proven to be a platform capable of ensuring the availability of complete, accurate, and ready-to-use test data for mission-critical applications and OSS/BSS systems. For this reason, it has been recognized as a Sample Vendor. This designation identifies providers that Gartner considers effective and recommendable within each category.

Download Hype Cycle for Operation Models, 2024 for more information

Why and how to implement TDM in DevOps

This prediction is built upon one of TDM’s main strengths: the fact that it offers a comprehensive approach for data provisioning that goes beyond specific techniques like data masking, virtualization, or synthetic data generation: its role is to manage the entire lifecycle of test data. 

In order to do so, TDM encompasses planning, provisioning, securing, and maintaining test data, all while aligning with the specific needs of the development and testing cycles at hand. This also means TDM involves the close collaboration of development and data security teams, capable of efficiently resolving important security components and regulations.

The report offers additional insights, including recommendations on how to successfully implement TDM practices within organizations. It’s in this context where icaria Technology is cited as a sample vendor for TDM solutions.

icaria TDM, sample vendor for implementing TDM solutions

icaria TDM tool represents a comprehensive Test Data Management solution that helps organizations manage test data more effectively by automating tasks like sensitive data anonymization, pseudonymization, and secure data provisioning for testing purposes. 

Designed to ensure GDPR compliance and in alignment with DevOps initiatives, Icaria TDM enables faster, more reliable testing and improves software quality.

Some of its key benefits include:

• Facilitates regulatory compliance by generating test data in accordance with privacy regulations, avoiding penalties and costs associated with audits or sensitive data breaches. More specifically, icaria TDM helps meet GDPR requirements thanks to the automated identification of sensitive data and its anonymisation and pseudonymisation capabilities.
• Reduces bottlenecks in the development cycle by providing development and testing teams with quality data quickly and securely. According to our own experience, icaria TDM can reduce wait times by half, while reducing costs associated with data storage, management, and provisioning.
• Improves test coverage and accuracy, leading to higher-quality software.
• Enables organizations to mitigate risks and improve operational efficiency by having realistic and secure data for testing applications.
• Results in more agile and organized development cycles 
• Incorporates advanced features such as a test data finder engine, a self-service and on-demand approach and integration with third party tools via REST API and extensible code.

As such, icaria TDM stands out among the solutions available today to manage testing and production environments efficiently, including DevOps initiatives.

Get in touch with us for a free consultation to learn more about how to reduce working times, improve software quality and ensure compliance thanks to icaria TDM.