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COVID-19 Increases Demand for Digital Services and Puts Pressure On IT Professionals

Tobias Dunn-Krahn
xMatters

One byproduct of COVID-19-imposed stay-at-home mandates is an unprecedented reliance on digital services for everything from grocery shopping and food delivery to video conferencing and workflow automation. And it's impacting both consumers of those digital services and the IT operations professionals responsible for delivering them.

To get greater insight into how this mass migration from analog to virtual services is impacting users and IT teams, xMatters surveyed 300 consumers and 300 IT professionals, including DevOps teams, ITOps teams, site reliability engineers, and developers in companies of over 500 employees.

Seventy-five percent of the technology professionals said they have the right products and processes to support the increased adoption of digital services. But wait, 54% of consumers reported unsatisfactory experiences with digital services, ranging from poor application performance to a complete crash.

A staggering 90% of consumers are using digital services. It's no surprise that over 80% are using them more today than ever, but ITOps teams can't just wait for things to return to "normal." That's because more than 80% of consumers plan to continue using digital services at this rate even after the stay-at-home era has passed.

Just what technology teams need: more pressure.

Technology teams are working under extreme pressure professionally and personally. Many companies were already planning or in the early stages of their digital transformations, and COVID-19 mandates are causing that work to fast-forward.

Per the survey, accelerated digital transformation means ITOps is managing more data and learning new technologies (automation, orchestration, cloud). Due to the combination of these factors, 36% of IT pros say they want a better understanding of incident management and resolution best practices.

For IT teams the challenges don't stop there. Almost 80% of respondents say privacy and security is also an even greater focus due to the remote work environment.

All this sudden change is taking a human toll. Fifty percent of IT Operations professionals are working increased hours and are experiencing a diminished work-life balance. Another 38% are working the same number of hours, but their workdays are starting earlier, ending later, or are just different.

Tobias Dunn-Krahn is CTO of xMatters

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...

COVID-19 Increases Demand for Digital Services and Puts Pressure On IT Professionals

Tobias Dunn-Krahn
xMatters

One byproduct of COVID-19-imposed stay-at-home mandates is an unprecedented reliance on digital services for everything from grocery shopping and food delivery to video conferencing and workflow automation. And it's impacting both consumers of those digital services and the IT operations professionals responsible for delivering them.

To get greater insight into how this mass migration from analog to virtual services is impacting users and IT teams, xMatters surveyed 300 consumers and 300 IT professionals, including DevOps teams, ITOps teams, site reliability engineers, and developers in companies of over 500 employees.

Seventy-five percent of the technology professionals said they have the right products and processes to support the increased adoption of digital services. But wait, 54% of consumers reported unsatisfactory experiences with digital services, ranging from poor application performance to a complete crash.

A staggering 90% of consumers are using digital services. It's no surprise that over 80% are using them more today than ever, but ITOps teams can't just wait for things to return to "normal." That's because more than 80% of consumers plan to continue using digital services at this rate even after the stay-at-home era has passed.

Just what technology teams need: more pressure.

Technology teams are working under extreme pressure professionally and personally. Many companies were already planning or in the early stages of their digital transformations, and COVID-19 mandates are causing that work to fast-forward.

Per the survey, accelerated digital transformation means ITOps is managing more data and learning new technologies (automation, orchestration, cloud). Due to the combination of these factors, 36% of IT pros say they want a better understanding of incident management and resolution best practices.

For IT teams the challenges don't stop there. Almost 80% of respondents say privacy and security is also an even greater focus due to the remote work environment.

All this sudden change is taking a human toll. Fifty percent of IT Operations professionals are working increased hours and are experiencing a diminished work-life balance. Another 38% are working the same number of hours, but their workdays are starting earlier, ending later, or are just different.

Tobias Dunn-Krahn is CTO of xMatters

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...