Where Do IT Professionals Need the Most Support During COVID-19?

Research shows an increased demand in APM, cloud monitoring and microservices
Angie Mistretta
AppDynamics
Learn more about Cisco

As the pressures for companies to deliver exceptional digital experiences dramatically increase, digital transformation is now a key priority for all. Whether its supporting a remote workforce with collaboration tools or updating a healthcare application to make information about testing facilities more available, the COVID-19 pandemic has exponentially accelerated digital transformation projects for internal and external purposes and is forcing IT teams to adopt new systems and expand their existing tools in order to keep up. In verticals such as higher education, finance and retail, we're seeing IT deployment timelines of 5-10 years accelerate to weeks or months as companies contend with students and customers who now only interact through applications.

Our almost instantaneous and complete reliance on technology for day-to-day activities — from working remotely, ordering groceries, or having a happy hour with friends — forced industry professionals to rapidly adapt to meet the new demands. In this new world, where companies are relying on IT teams to have the right answer to each new challenge, it is important to recognize how technology vendors can support them. What are vendors offering and what do these professionals need?

Identifying Where IT Professionals Need the Most Help

To better understand where IT professionals are turning for help, we analyzed the online behaviors of IT decision-makers across the AppDynamics website during a peak period of the COVID-19 pandemic, March 1 through April 4, 2020. Our research found an increase in demand for resources related to APM, microservices and dependence on cloud services. This shows IT professionals are searching for more effective ways to manage, optimize and scale services to meet their users' expectations.

APM, Cloud and Microservices Are On the Rise

Instead of storefronts, customers have been depending on the reliability of digital experiences to keep things as normal as possible. Similarly, the complete shift to work from home for many companies accelerated a fully digital experience sooner than most expected. Monitoring and evaluating the performance of apps across the network makes sure employees and customers are having dynamic and personalized experiences, which ultimately drives brand loyalty. During the COVID-19 pandemic, web traffic for information about APM service has increased 24 percent and we experienced a 233 percent increase in attendance for an APM class, making it clear there is a huge desire to better understand the technology.

Additionally, the pandemic has made it difficult for businesses to predict demand or rely on capacity models built without accounting for the rapid behavior changes that are occurring. IT decision makers need flexibility to quickly scale resources up and down as user demands shift and we all adjust to this new physically disperse and app heavy reality. The cloud is what will help enable this. Some organizations who previously deployed on-premise software now need to enable a remote workforce and provide access to business-critical data in real-time to geographically dispersed teams. Validating these shifts in IT priorities, we saw a 40 percent increase in traffic to cloud monitoring related pages highlighting that a path to the cloud is necessary for business survival right now.

IT professionals are faced with the challenge of constantly evolving the quality of a digital experience so it makes sense that microservices would also be of interest. As microservices help develop, test and deploy code as efficiently as possible, web traffic for resources focused on microservices adoption and how to leverage microservices to enhance user experience has increased by 21 percent since the pandemic began.

These IT decision makers are accelerating adoption of container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes to manage and scale workloads. We found a 20 percent increase in web traffic for resources related to Kubernetes monitoring and a 33 percent increase in demand for resources about best practices for instrumenting containers.

It is clear that our increased dependence on the digital experience is pushing IT departments to find more efficient ways of deploying applications without breaking their budgets or alienating customers or employees in the process. IT professionals need additional support and tools to address their current challenges, which will not vanish post-pandemic.

This means that business leaders need to give them the tools, support and freedom they need to adopt new technologies and transform digital business models at a pace faster than anything we have seen before.

Angie Mistretta is CMO of AppDynamics, a part of Cisco

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Where Do IT Professionals Need the Most Support During COVID-19?

Research shows an increased demand in APM, cloud monitoring and microservices
Angie Mistretta
AppDynamics
Learn more about Cisco

As the pressures for companies to deliver exceptional digital experiences dramatically increase, digital transformation is now a key priority for all. Whether its supporting a remote workforce with collaboration tools or updating a healthcare application to make information about testing facilities more available, the COVID-19 pandemic has exponentially accelerated digital transformation projects for internal and external purposes and is forcing IT teams to adopt new systems and expand their existing tools in order to keep up. In verticals such as higher education, finance and retail, we're seeing IT deployment timelines of 5-10 years accelerate to weeks or months as companies contend with students and customers who now only interact through applications.

Our almost instantaneous and complete reliance on technology for day-to-day activities — from working remotely, ordering groceries, or having a happy hour with friends — forced industry professionals to rapidly adapt to meet the new demands. In this new world, where companies are relying on IT teams to have the right answer to each new challenge, it is important to recognize how technology vendors can support them. What are vendors offering and what do these professionals need?

Identifying Where IT Professionals Need the Most Help

To better understand where IT professionals are turning for help, we analyzed the online behaviors of IT decision-makers across the AppDynamics website during a peak period of the COVID-19 pandemic, March 1 through April 4, 2020. Our research found an increase in demand for resources related to APM, microservices and dependence on cloud services. This shows IT professionals are searching for more effective ways to manage, optimize and scale services to meet their users' expectations.

APM, Cloud and Microservices Are On the Rise

Instead of storefronts, customers have been depending on the reliability of digital experiences to keep things as normal as possible. Similarly, the complete shift to work from home for many companies accelerated a fully digital experience sooner than most expected. Monitoring and evaluating the performance of apps across the network makes sure employees and customers are having dynamic and personalized experiences, which ultimately drives brand loyalty. During the COVID-19 pandemic, web traffic for information about APM service has increased 24 percent and we experienced a 233 percent increase in attendance for an APM class, making it clear there is a huge desire to better understand the technology.

Additionally, the pandemic has made it difficult for businesses to predict demand or rely on capacity models built without accounting for the rapid behavior changes that are occurring. IT decision makers need flexibility to quickly scale resources up and down as user demands shift and we all adjust to this new physically disperse and app heavy reality. The cloud is what will help enable this. Some organizations who previously deployed on-premise software now need to enable a remote workforce and provide access to business-critical data in real-time to geographically dispersed teams. Validating these shifts in IT priorities, we saw a 40 percent increase in traffic to cloud monitoring related pages highlighting that a path to the cloud is necessary for business survival right now.

IT professionals are faced with the challenge of constantly evolving the quality of a digital experience so it makes sense that microservices would also be of interest. As microservices help develop, test and deploy code as efficiently as possible, web traffic for resources focused on microservices adoption and how to leverage microservices to enhance user experience has increased by 21 percent since the pandemic began.

These IT decision makers are accelerating adoption of container orchestration technologies like Kubernetes to manage and scale workloads. We found a 20 percent increase in web traffic for resources related to Kubernetes monitoring and a 33 percent increase in demand for resources about best practices for instrumenting containers.

It is clear that our increased dependence on the digital experience is pushing IT departments to find more efficient ways of deploying applications without breaking their budgets or alienating customers or employees in the process. IT professionals need additional support and tools to address their current challenges, which will not vanish post-pandemic.

This means that business leaders need to give them the tools, support and freedom they need to adopt new technologies and transform digital business models at a pace faster than anything we have seen before.

Angie Mistretta is CMO of AppDynamics, a part of Cisco

Related Links

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As AI Scales Across Enterprises, Breaking Points Emerge

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Preparing Network Infrastructure for AI Starts with the Basics

AI is usually talked about as a software tool, but it also depends heavily on the network behind it. Whether a company is using AI for chatbots, automation, monitoring, analytics, or employee support, all of that information has to move across the network in a reliable and secure way. That means AI is not just an application decision. It is also an infrastructure decision. Before organizations rush into AI, they should ask a simple question: Is our network ready to support it? ...

Agentic Operations Begin with Governed Middleware Access

Enterprise AI often lacks governed access to where business processes actually execute. Without that access, AI agents may be able to reason, but they cannot operate reliably across enterprise workflows. For AI agents to effectively carry out workflows, they will require integration-layer context and controls. Organizations can implement these prerequisites by providing AI with managed access to the middleware layer ...

The Network Data Problem Slowing Down Enterprise AIOps

Enterprise networks rarely behave the same way for very long. A routing adjustment in one region may unexpectedly alter application performance in another. A cloud migration may introduce hidden dependencies that go unnoticed until an outage occurs. All the while, the network is managed by several different teams, each of whom use different tool sets — and as a result, have different views of the network ... There’s usually an engineer who remembers why traffic fails over a certain way between sites, or which transparent firewall was added where. The problem is that human memory cannot scale alongside enterprise-scale networks ...

The Governance Gap Behind AI's Infrastructure Problem

Ask an infrastructure team how confident they are in their ability to govern AI, and most will tell you they've got it handled. A recent survey of 406 IT decision-makers and platform engineering leaders found 86% expressing exactly that confidence. Ask the same group whether they have a formal written AI governance policy, and the number drops to 30%, according to Spacelift's Infrastructure Automation Report ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 27: Observability Unification

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This year, many of the cloud infrastructure contracts signed in the early days of the AI boom will come up for renewal. As the year goes on, I anticipate we'll see a significant amount of cloud vendor swapouts and multi-cloud adoption, and the reason isn't just GPU depreciation. It's because they're tired of their current cloud providers ...

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