GitLab Ultimate: How to Boost Delivery Efficiency, Security, and Increased ROI Across Your Business

Last Updated on March 6, 2024

Why do companies choose GitLab Ultimate as their DevOps tool? Let’s look at Forrester’s research on GitLab to see what economic impact GitLab has on businesses: it brings an 80 % reduction in defects in code, improved development and delivery efficiency by over 87%, and increased revenue thanks to a 12x times boost in the release. And that is not all! It’s just the tip of the iceberg! 

In this article, we will focus on GitLab Ultimate and what benefits and progress it brings to its users regarding development and delivery, return on investments (ROI), and security operations. But first, let’s say a few words about what GitLab Ultimate is.

Why do organizations choose GitLab Ultimate?

GitLab is a DevOps platform with over 31 million users, and GitLab Ultimate is the top-tier version of the GitLab software development platform designed for larger, more complex organizations. On the main page of GitLab, we can easily see the catchy description:

“GitLab Ultimate is ideal for organizations aiming to optimize and accelerate delivery while managing priorities, security, risk, and compliance.”

GitLab webpage

 Among the key features of GitLab Ultimate we should mention the following:

• advanced CI/CD, which among standard GitLab features includes multi-project pipelines and deployment approvals,
• Security and Compliance, including security dashboards and container scanning, audit logs, and code review approvals,
• better portfolio and source code management,
• High Availability, which ensures high availability and reliability.  

How GitLab Ultimate Boosts Delivery?

What is the most important outcome for a DevOps team today? Yeap, improved development and efficient delivery. Using a number of different toolchains for sure slows down the DevOps processes and leads to inefficient development, deterioration of the quality of code, and decreases your DevOps team’s ability to release the code efficiently. Thus, a GitLab Ultimate single solution makes it possible to improve DevOps’ ability to build the source code, test it, collaborate and communicate better, and release the updates across the applications faster.

Actually, GitLab Ultimate enables the DevOps teams to reduce time spent on the following areas: the stage of planning, the stage of coding and reviewing the code, the stage of building and verifying CI, and the stage of packaging, releasing, configuring, and monitoring the CD.

And just imagine by using GitLab Ultimate, companies can improve their planning stage by 65 %, and the rest of the stages by more than 85 %.

Such an efficient improvement helps businesses stay competitive by lowering the expenses of the SDLC, accelerating the delivery of the necessary applications to the market, and, finally, it allows the company to create and manage innovative solutions for their customers. 

Increased ROI across your business: what you should know?

After interviewing numerous organizations, Forrester came to a conclusion that:

“ In Year 1, the composite organization has 90 revenue-generating applications. By Year 3, this increases to 100.”

GitLab significantly influences the composite organization’s capacity to develop, test, and deliver changes across all of its apps. The solution helps to improve and simplify the companies’ procedures, increasing the effectiveness of their developers and non-technical staff, enhancing visibility and teamwork across the whole process, and raising the caliber of their output. Thus, companies manage to increase revenue and market share and improve their customers’ satisfaction. 

Better quality of code brings peace of mind 

Mistakes happen all the time, and usually, per project, the company may find around 30 defects per month, and on average it takes 30 minutes to find and fix each of those defects. So, the team may waste around 15 hours (it’s almost 2 working days!) a month on such unnecessary activities.

Using GitLab Ultimate companies can test, scan and verify code before it is released in a single application. And it not only saves your DevOps team’s time but brings other benefits:

• It allows the organization to maintain high quality and security standards. 
• It permits catching bugs earlier in the entire DevOps lifecycle (before your code is released and causes issues).
• It helps to automate the process and perform the testing early and often with the help of Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) enabled. 

Thus, according to Forrester’s research with GitLab, “the organization reduces the number of defects by 80 %” and helps the company stay competitive and meet the needs of its customers by creating better source code. 

Moreover, GitLab Ultimate offers more tools for licensing compliance, enhanced security, and vulnerability management through the security dashboard, which tracks vulnerabilities at the pipeline, group, and instance levels for projects. GitLab Ultimate also adds more pipeline capabilities. 

A few words about boosting security

Bugs and vulnerabilities are not the only difficulties, your organization can face while building the source code. Ransomware attacks, human errors, and outages all of that can lead to data loss, financial loss, and your team’s frustration. 

Eliminate data loss risk and ensure business continuity with the first TRUE Disaster Recovery software for GitLab.

GitProtect.io – a GitLab Ultimate backup is the answer to those issues. Though, to access your GitLab data anytime and recover it from any point in time you should be sure that your backup solution: 

• covers not only GitLab repositories but also metadata, 
• backups GitLab groups and subgroups
• permits to have automated scheduled backups in multiple storages (both cloud and on-premise) with some free cloud storage space included
• has ransomware protection technology, immutable storage, in-flight and at-rest encryption with your own encryption key, and more security features
• enables GitLab restore and Disaster Recovery Technologies, including point-in-time recovery, cross-over recovery (to enable migration to GitHub or Bitbucket), granular recovery, and restoring to a local instance or same/another GitLab account. 
• SAML authorization 
• SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance.

Want to build a reliable GitLab backup strategy? Check out our GitLab backup and restore best practices.