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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

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A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

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Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

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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

A new wave of tariffs, some exceeding 100%, is sending shockwaves across the technology industry. Enterprises are grappling with sudden, dramatic cost increases that threaten to disrupt carefully planned budgets, sourcing strategies, and deployment plans. For CIOs and CTOs, this isn't just an economic setback; it's a wake-up call. The era of predictable cloud pricing and stable global supply chains is over ...

As artificial intelligence (AI) adoption gains momentum, network readiness is emerging as a critical success factor. AI workloads generate unpredictable bursts of traffic, demanding high-speed connectivity that is low latency and lossless. AI adoption will require upgrades and optimizations in data center networks and wide-area networks (WANs). This is prompting enterprise IT teams to rethink, re-architect, and upgrade their data center and WANs to support AI-driven operations ...

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...