The role of IT in Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) is to build, manage, and secure the automated pipeline that allows a business to rapidly and reliably deliver software from the developer’s keyboard to the live production environment.
As of September 9, 2025, for any modern software company in Pakistan, a CI/CD pipeline is the engine of its development process. While the developers (“Dev”) write the code, the IT and Operations (“Ops”) team is the indispensable partner that builds the “digital factory” through which that code is tested and delivered.
1. The Architect of the Pipeline: Building the Automated Workflow
The most fundamental role of IT is to architect the CI/CD pipeline itself.
- What It Is: A CI/CD pipeline is a series of automated steps that every piece of new code must go through.
- The IT Role: The IT/Ops team is responsible for selecting, integrating, and maintaining the tools that make up this pipeline. This includes:
- The Code Repository: (e.g., Git).
- The CI/CD Server: The engine of the pipeline (e.g., Jenkins, GitLab CI).
- The Automated Testing Frameworks.
- The Deployment Tools. IT builds the automated “conveyor belt” that moves the code from one stage to the next.
2. The Guardian of the Environment: Infrastructure as Code (IaC)
IT is responsible for provisioning and managing the environments (testing, staging, production) that the code runs in. In a modern CI/CD pipeline, this is done through code.
- What It Is: Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of managing infrastructure (servers, networks, databases) through code, rather than manual configuration.
- The IT Role: The IT team writes the IaC scripts (using tools like Terraform or Ansible) that are executed by the CI/CD pipeline. When a new version of the application needs to be tested, the pipeline automatically runs these scripts to build a perfect, clean, and consistent testing environment from scratch. This eliminates the common problem of “it worked on my machine.”
3. The Enforcer of Security: Integrating DevSecOps
In a modern DevSecOps culture, security is integrated directly into the pipeline, and the IT security team is responsible for managing these automated security gates.
- What It Is: Integrating automated security scanning tools into the CI/CD pipeline.
- The IT Role: The IT security team will integrate tools that automatically:
- Scan the code for known vulnerabilities.
- Check for insecure configurations in the Infrastructure as Code files.
- Scan the running application in the testing environment for security flaws. If a critical vulnerability is found, the pipeline is automatically “broken,” preventing the insecure code from ever reaching production.
4. The Keeper of the Keys: Managing the Production Environment
Finally, the IT team is the ultimate guardian of the live, production environment where the customers interact with the application.
- What It Is: The final stage of the pipeline is the Continuous Deployment to the production servers.
- The IT Role: IT is responsible for the availability, performance, and security of this live environment. They manage the final deployment process, monitor the health of the application after release, and have the tools and processes in place to quickly roll back to a previous version if a problem is detected.