Two years ago, almost every customer conversation about AI started with the same questions: Which model should we use? What can it do? Is it ready for the enterprise? Today, those discussions have moved on. CIOs are far more interested in how to govern AI, integrate it with existing systems, prepare their workforce and make it part of everyday operations. The challenge is no longer to prove that AI can deliver value. It's instead about how to embed AI into the business in a way that's secure, scalable and delivers measurable outcomes ...
Two things happened to production incidents between 2023 and now, and they did not happen at the same speed. The first is that a class of dependency that barely existed three years ago now accounts for one incident in ten. Incidents disclosed by AI model and AI application providers rose from 1.7% of all disclosed unplanned incidents in 2023 to 10.7% in 2026 year to date, roughly a sixfold rise; that counts only incidents at AI companies themselves, so the true share is higher. The second is that the time to close an incident has not come down ...
When an AI assistant gives an incomplete or incorrect answer, teams often blame the model. They adjust prompts, switch models, increase context windows or test a new retrieval strategy. However the model may not be a problem. In many enterprise AI workflows, the problem begins inside the document-ingestion pipeline ...
If you talk to any security or observability teams right now, they're all fighting the same fire: their tooling was built to ingest X, but their sources are pumping Y and soon to be doing Z. The knee-jerk reaction is always the same: we need more platform. However, this reaction is wrong. Let me explain why, because the solution to this problem is foundational, not financial. Instead of hurling yet more money at the problem, make sure you've done what's needed upstream ...
Rapid AI adoption and the unique ways AI workloads operate is redefining the scope and structure of what these teams must deliver. This shift is forcing organizations to rethink how they manage scale, automation, and control, according to The State of SRE and Platform Engineering 2026, a new report from Dynatrace ...
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? ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 27, Shamus McGillicuddy, EMA VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, and Parker Hathcock, EMA Research Director covering IT Service/Operations (ServiceOps), discuss observability unification in modern IT operations ...
Virtual Private Networks became a cornerstone of enterprise security at a time when corporate infrastructure looked very different from today ... For years, this model worked well. But the architecture behind VPNs assumed a centralized corporate environment—one where the network itself was the hub of activity. In a cloud — first world, that assumption no longer holds ...
Website outages get resolved just as fast in August as they do in November. I went looking for the opposite: the summer slowdown everyone assumes is there once the people who fix things are away. It isn't in the data we collected, covering 1.8 million confirmed outages across tens of thousands of websites ...
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 ...
There's a moment the many observability teams have experienced days into bringing a new service into production: you realize that the vendor's claims of "intelligent" behavior included a large serving of hype. Their dashboards look nice until they don't, the failure modes are a black box, and no one on the team can confidently explain why the system did what it did at 2 am. Agentic AI is about to force every Ops team to relive that moment at web-scale until they start treating these systems as the dependencies they actually are ...
AI is broadly meeting ROI expectations in IT Service Management (ITSM), but for most teams, it is not yet easing the burden on the people doing the work, according to the 2026 State of ITSM Report from SolarWinds, a study of how IT teams are using AI in their ITSM workflows ...