How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 5

APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 5, the final installment in the series, covers open source and emerging technologies.

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 1

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 2

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 4

OPEN SOURCE

Although 2020 has been a year of change, ITOps teams have been building for scale for quite some time, and our teams have become more distributed than ever. By utilizing new capabilities in cloud native architectures, where observability is embedded in our open source stacks teams have more options than ever. Open source is the new normal.
Jonah Kowall
CTO, Logz.io

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

We should ensure the teams are up to date with new emerging technologies. While the new norm influences our physical presence, technology continues to progress and we want our team to have the ability to learn, develop and find ways to advance the organization (and themselves) by leveraging new technologies and solutions. The organization should assist the Ops engineers in being up to date from this perspective as well.
Ziv Oren
Chief Delivery Officer, Aqua Security

SAAS

The new normal already has large parts of the workforce WFH and away from the office. ITOps teams will continue to focus on organizational solutions that provide stability and easy integration into pre-existing environments. This gives an advantage to SaaS solutions, which can be updated remotely, typically with high uptimes.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

PUBLIC CLOUD IAAS

COVID-19 has dramatically amplified several existing trends and needs across teams. For ITOps, I think it has shown the importance of the move to Public Cloud IaaS — which means a reduction in their role, but it's the only route to scale/reliability. Where ITOps do still run systems, the mass migration to remote working has forever changed the infrastructure needs and cadence of evolution. Although most of what the team does can be done remotely, as everyone has moved to WFH, there is a considerable impact on the SREs and ITOps teams that manage the infrastructure data centers. They need to work in capsules to not to infect each other and maintain a working force that physically administers the data center. All clouds are basically physical servers that need maintenance at the end of the day.
Avishai Sharlin
Division President, Amdocs Technology

SDWAN

One key to navigating these challenging times is for ITOps to look at underlying network infrastructure to make sure it can handle the evolving demands of the business, and then plan a network upgrade in a way that's not disruptive to the business. Many organizations have turned to SD-WAN as the answer — and rightly so, because it provides a way to control application performance while centralizing and simplifying network and resource management. However, pretty much all SD-WAN vendors require an overhaul of the network infrastructure in order to implement, which is time-consuming, costly, disruptive, and slow to deliver results. Our recommendation is that ITOps consider a solution that doesn't require re-engineering of the network. Take advantage of transparent hybrid technologies in order to gain the application performance and network management benefits of SD-WAN immediately (rather than the typical 6-18+ months you'd be looking at with most solutions), without having to re-architect the network. The ideal SD-WAN solution enables a « hands-free » migration, which involves placing a device that is essentially invisible to the network and delivers instant end-to-end application visibility and control. Meanwhile, the business can migrate to a complete SD-WAN at their own pace, avoiding the risk, disruption, and delayed ROI associated with a complex network project. Additionally, the enterprise should consider whether an SD-WAN solution offers multi-cloud capabilities and supports work from home scenarios, because in the long term ,the network edge is expanding beyond the physical boundaries of the corporate perimeter. Lastly, cost flexibility is essential; the enterprise should insist on consumption-based pricing models in order to control costs and maintain flexibility as they grow or shift workloads and sites up or down. Ultimately, ITOps needs a network that can grow and scale with the business, as they adapt to unpredictable circumstances facing their business today and beyond.
Zabrina Doerck
Director of Product Marketing, Infovista

FULL-STACK SCALABILITY

The move to 100% remote ITOps underscores the importance of reliable, scalable, automatable infrastructure up and down the stack. Every part of your application stack, particularly the oft-overlooked foundational parts (think: servers, load balancers, VPNs, DNS), need to be just as agile and easy to deploy, update, and scale as your core application. This will enable you to react to changing business needs rapidly. The ability to scale your internal back-office application by 10x in 10 minutes is fantastic, but if none of your employees can access the system because your VPNs are overloaded, you've got a problem. Take the opportunity to look at every piece of software and hardware that powers your business and ask: "How agile and fragile is this?" "How does it scale?" "How can it be automated?" Because when it comes time to deliver on new goals and KPIs in the future, companies that have invested in making their entire stack more reliable and scalable will have a massive advantage.
Jonathan Sullivan
CTO, NS1

Related Links

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When the Database Is the Problem, Is APM Enough?

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

From Cleanup to Prevention: The Future of Cloud-Native Cost Optimization

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

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The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

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The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...

How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 5

APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 5, the final installment in the series, covers open source and emerging technologies.

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 1

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 2

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 4

OPEN SOURCE

Although 2020 has been a year of change, ITOps teams have been building for scale for quite some time, and our teams have become more distributed than ever. By utilizing new capabilities in cloud native architectures, where observability is embedded in our open source stacks teams have more options than ever. Open source is the new normal.
Jonah Kowall
CTO, Logz.io

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

We should ensure the teams are up to date with new emerging technologies. While the new norm influences our physical presence, technology continues to progress and we want our team to have the ability to learn, develop and find ways to advance the organization (and themselves) by leveraging new technologies and solutions. The organization should assist the Ops engineers in being up to date from this perspective as well.
Ziv Oren
Chief Delivery Officer, Aqua Security

SAAS

The new normal already has large parts of the workforce WFH and away from the office. ITOps teams will continue to focus on organizational solutions that provide stability and easy integration into pre-existing environments. This gives an advantage to SaaS solutions, which can be updated remotely, typically with high uptimes.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

PUBLIC CLOUD IAAS

COVID-19 has dramatically amplified several existing trends and needs across teams. For ITOps, I think it has shown the importance of the move to Public Cloud IaaS — which means a reduction in their role, but it's the only route to scale/reliability. Where ITOps do still run systems, the mass migration to remote working has forever changed the infrastructure needs and cadence of evolution. Although most of what the team does can be done remotely, as everyone has moved to WFH, there is a considerable impact on the SREs and ITOps teams that manage the infrastructure data centers. They need to work in capsules to not to infect each other and maintain a working force that physically administers the data center. All clouds are basically physical servers that need maintenance at the end of the day.
Avishai Sharlin
Division President, Amdocs Technology

SDWAN

One key to navigating these challenging times is for ITOps to look at underlying network infrastructure to make sure it can handle the evolving demands of the business, and then plan a network upgrade in a way that's not disruptive to the business. Many organizations have turned to SD-WAN as the answer — and rightly so, because it provides a way to control application performance while centralizing and simplifying network and resource management. However, pretty much all SD-WAN vendors require an overhaul of the network infrastructure in order to implement, which is time-consuming, costly, disruptive, and slow to deliver results. Our recommendation is that ITOps consider a solution that doesn't require re-engineering of the network. Take advantage of transparent hybrid technologies in order to gain the application performance and network management benefits of SD-WAN immediately (rather than the typical 6-18+ months you'd be looking at with most solutions), without having to re-architect the network. The ideal SD-WAN solution enables a « hands-free » migration, which involves placing a device that is essentially invisible to the network and delivers instant end-to-end application visibility and control. Meanwhile, the business can migrate to a complete SD-WAN at their own pace, avoiding the risk, disruption, and delayed ROI associated with a complex network project. Additionally, the enterprise should consider whether an SD-WAN solution offers multi-cloud capabilities and supports work from home scenarios, because in the long term ,the network edge is expanding beyond the physical boundaries of the corporate perimeter. Lastly, cost flexibility is essential; the enterprise should insist on consumption-based pricing models in order to control costs and maintain flexibility as they grow or shift workloads and sites up or down. Ultimately, ITOps needs a network that can grow and scale with the business, as they adapt to unpredictable circumstances facing their business today and beyond.
Zabrina Doerck
Director of Product Marketing, Infovista

FULL-STACK SCALABILITY

The move to 100% remote ITOps underscores the importance of reliable, scalable, automatable infrastructure up and down the stack. Every part of your application stack, particularly the oft-overlooked foundational parts (think: servers, load balancers, VPNs, DNS), need to be just as agile and easy to deploy, update, and scale as your core application. This will enable you to react to changing business needs rapidly. The ability to scale your internal back-office application by 10x in 10 minutes is fantastic, but if none of your employees can access the system because your VPNs are overloaded, you've got a problem. Take the opportunity to look at every piece of software and hardware that powers your business and ask: "How agile and fragile is this?" "How does it scale?" "How can it be automated?" Because when it comes time to deliver on new goals and KPIs in the future, companies that have invested in making their entire stack more reliable and scalable will have a massive advantage.
Jonathan Sullivan
CTO, NS1

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

When the Database Is the Problem, Is APM Enough?

Production incidents rarely announce themselves as database problems. They appear as slow transactions, timeouts, rising response times, or an application struggling under a workload it previously handled. APM provides an essential starting point. It can identify a slow transaction path, highlight an affected service, and show that a database dependency is consuming more time than expected. But identifying the database as part of the problem is not the same as explaining what is happening inside it ...

From Cleanup to Prevention: The Future of Cloud-Native Cost Optimization

Cloud teams are under constant pressure to reduce spend without slowing development or increasing operational risk. They are deploying autoscalers, rightsizing workloads, enforcing resource requests, reviewing utilization dashboards, and building FinOps processes around cloud-native environments. Yet the results often disappoint ...

The Real Enterprise AI Risk Isn't Hallucinations

Ask most IT leaders about their biggest concern with AI and you'll hear the same answer: hallucinations ... Today, however, the conversation has shifted ... As organizations move beyond chatbots and experiments, they are increasingly deploying AI agents that perform multi-step tasks. These systems retrieve documents, query databases, call APIs, generate reports, write code, and make recommendations. The issue is not whether the model can reason. The issue is whether the organization can see, verify, and govern the decisions being made along the way ...

Beyond Buy vs. Build: The New Playbook for Data Pipelines

While organizations want to take control of their telemetry, building telemetry pipelines from scratch can be a very daunting, complicated task, even when leveraging open-source standards like OpenTelemetry. It requires specialized knowledge across distributed systems, data engineering, and security. This fragmented approach across systems causes higher operational costs; it puts a strain on resources and reduces efficiency as teams have to work with different interfaces and processes ...

The Corporate Network Is Fading - Here's What Replaces It

For decades, enterprise networks were designed around a simple assumption: work happened inside the office. Applications lived in centralized data centers, employees connected through internal infrastructure, and security focused on protecting the perimeter that surrounded everything ... But the way organizations operate today bears little resemblance to that environment. Cloud platforms host critical applications, employees connect from homes and airports as often as they do from offices, and partners collaborate through shared systems that exist far beyond corporate walls. In short, the corporate network no longer resembles the environment it was designed to protect ...

IT Leaders Must Establish a Network Data Architecture Practice

As an analyst who researches how IT organizations design, build, and operate their networks, I find that network data is a constant source of pain. Network teams struggle with data quality, fragmentation, authority, access, and trust. And these issues undermine everything they try to do. Here are the numbers: Only 45% of network teams are completely confident in the accuracy of their network source of truth, which documents the intent of their network ...

Data Center Outages Are Decreasing but More Costly

The 2026 Global Data Center Survey from Uptime Institute reveals an industry navigating workforce constraints, escalating outage expenses, even as rising costs remain the top concern for management teams ...

Observability Has a Physical Layer Now: What AI Infrastructure Teaches IT Operations

The next observability gap may not be in the code. It may be under the rack. That sounds strange until you think about how AI incidents actually feel in the middle of an investigation ... The application dashboard may be accurate. It may also be stopping at the wrong boundary. AI systems depend on software, but they also depend on a dense physical stack: racks, power paths, thermal margin, maintenance activity and, in many environments, liquid cooling. Those physical dependencies can change slowly before they look like a software incident ...

TLS Certificate Expiration Is Becoming an Observability Problem

Certificate expiration is the rare outage you can see coming. Every TLS certificate carries the date it stops working, so the moment it will begin breaking connections is knowable in advance. That's what makes an expired certificate such a frustrating way to lose a service. What's changing now is how often that date comes around ...

Enterprise Cloud Observability: Choosing the Right Starting Point

Enterprises operate different combinations of workloads across cloud, hybrid and multicloud environments. For business-critical workloads, teams need to consider monitoring and observability early so they can detect health issues, investigate failures, and understand operational impact. Organizations place workloads on cloud platforms based on a combination of technical requirements, economics, existing dependencies, organizational standards, and business priorities. Their monitoring priorities therefore depend on what they operate and where those systems run. Those priorities will not look the same for every organization ...