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.