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IT Has Proven Rapid Digital Transformation is Possible - What's Next?

Paul Davenport
AppNeta

The pandemic effectively "shocked" enterprises into pushing the gas on tech initiatives that, on the one hand, support a more flexible, decentralized workforce, but that were by-and-large already on the roadmap, regardless of whether businesses had been planning to support widespread work-from-home or not.

Retiring legacy, hardware-based applications and workflows that committed workers to sharing an office for more flexible and scalable cloud tools, for instance, was already in progress (though relatively slowly) at many businesses well before the pandemic made cloud migration a top priority. Showing business leaders that accelerated "digital transformations" like these could even be pulled off (let alone successfully) was just one business myth that was dispelled as part of the pandemic.

The second myth (at least among wary enterprise decision makers) was that IT teams couldn't successfully deploy network infrastructures that were fit to support widespread WFH. Not only has this been dispelled (again, many of the required changes to enable WFH go hand-in-hand with long-simmering digital overhauls), but many newly-remote teams are actually performing better in their new environment.

However, just because enterprise IT have proven in many cases that they can support an almost fully remote workforce doesn't mean that this will be the enterprise standard going forward.

A study conducted by workplace chat app Blind found that among the biggest Silicon Valley tech companies, for instance, pandemic-induced WFH is leading to workers feeling 68 percent more burnt out than they did last year. While the feeling is subjective, the increase can't be ignored. That said, workers in other industries like healthcare are seeing tangible benefits in conducting work at a distance.

So while WFH will never be a fit for every worker, now that both IT and knowledge workers have debunked the misconceptions of their most skeptical enterprise leaders, it'll be hard to convince everyone to "go back" to the old way once restrictions are finally lifted.

All of this goes to show that as much as we've learned about the positives of WFH in this global "experiment" in decentralization, it's too soon to fully say goodbye to the office as we knew it before the pandemic. Instead, companies will need to adapt to support a more fluid, "anywhere operations" model for work that will allow employees to enjoy similar experiences with the job wherever they log on.

For network operations teams going forward, the biggest challenge will be keeping up with the accelerated pace of change now that they've proven to skeptical business leaders their efficiency (and efficacy) in successfully transforming the network. This will require teams to put a greater emphasis on leveraging comprehensive visibility into end-user performance wherever users are located now that the footprint for potential errors has expanded with workers at home.

Supporting this "new normal" calls for enterprise IT teams to synchronize visibility across their rapidly evolving network footprint to ensure they can monitor and manage the digital experiences of users leveraging any app, from any location, at any point in time. With users logging onto the network from all over the map and adopting new technologies to stay in sync with their times, enterprise IT teams have to seek out visibility into network environments that they don't inherently have clear insights into or control over to ensure successful deployment.

Paul Davenport is Marketing Communications Manager at AppNeta

The Latest

A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

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The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...

IT Has Proven Rapid Digital Transformation is Possible - What's Next?

Paul Davenport
AppNeta

The pandemic effectively "shocked" enterprises into pushing the gas on tech initiatives that, on the one hand, support a more flexible, decentralized workforce, but that were by-and-large already on the roadmap, regardless of whether businesses had been planning to support widespread work-from-home or not.

Retiring legacy, hardware-based applications and workflows that committed workers to sharing an office for more flexible and scalable cloud tools, for instance, was already in progress (though relatively slowly) at many businesses well before the pandemic made cloud migration a top priority. Showing business leaders that accelerated "digital transformations" like these could even be pulled off (let alone successfully) was just one business myth that was dispelled as part of the pandemic.

The second myth (at least among wary enterprise decision makers) was that IT teams couldn't successfully deploy network infrastructures that were fit to support widespread WFH. Not only has this been dispelled (again, many of the required changes to enable WFH go hand-in-hand with long-simmering digital overhauls), but many newly-remote teams are actually performing better in their new environment.

However, just because enterprise IT have proven in many cases that they can support an almost fully remote workforce doesn't mean that this will be the enterprise standard going forward.

A study conducted by workplace chat app Blind found that among the biggest Silicon Valley tech companies, for instance, pandemic-induced WFH is leading to workers feeling 68 percent more burnt out than they did last year. While the feeling is subjective, the increase can't be ignored. That said, workers in other industries like healthcare are seeing tangible benefits in conducting work at a distance.

So while WFH will never be a fit for every worker, now that both IT and knowledge workers have debunked the misconceptions of their most skeptical enterprise leaders, it'll be hard to convince everyone to "go back" to the old way once restrictions are finally lifted.

All of this goes to show that as much as we've learned about the positives of WFH in this global "experiment" in decentralization, it's too soon to fully say goodbye to the office as we knew it before the pandemic. Instead, companies will need to adapt to support a more fluid, "anywhere operations" model for work that will allow employees to enjoy similar experiences with the job wherever they log on.

For network operations teams going forward, the biggest challenge will be keeping up with the accelerated pace of change now that they've proven to skeptical business leaders their efficiency (and efficacy) in successfully transforming the network. This will require teams to put a greater emphasis on leveraging comprehensive visibility into end-user performance wherever users are located now that the footprint for potential errors has expanded with workers at home.

Supporting this "new normal" calls for enterprise IT teams to synchronize visibility across their rapidly evolving network footprint to ensure they can monitor and manage the digital experiences of users leveraging any app, from any location, at any point in time. With users logging onto the network from all over the map and adopting new technologies to stay in sync with their times, enterprise IT teams have to seek out visibility into network environments that they don't inherently have clear insights into or control over to ensure successful deployment.

Paul Davenport is Marketing Communications Manager at AppNeta

The Latest

A major architectural shift is underway across enterprise networks, according to a new global study from Cisco. As AI assistants, agents, and data-driven workloads reshape how work gets done, they're creating faster, more dynamic, more latency-sensitive, and more complex network traffic. Combined with the ubiquity of connected devices, 24/7 uptime demands, and intensifying security threats, these shifts are driving infrastructure to adapt and evolve ...

Image
Cisco

The development of banking apps was supposed to provide users with convenience, control and piece of mind. However, for thousands of Halifax customers recently, a major mobile outage caused the exact opposite, leaving customers unable to check balances, or pay bills, sparking widespread frustration. This wasn't an isolated incident ... So why are these failures still happening? ...

Cyber threats are growing more sophisticated every day, and at their forefront are zero-day vulnerabilities. These elusive security gaps are exploited before a fix becomes available, making them among the most dangerous threats in today's digital landscape ... This guide will explore what these vulnerabilities are, how they work, why they pose such a significant threat, and how modern organizations can stay protected ...

The prevention of data center outages continues to be a strategic priority for data center owners and operators. Infrastructure equipment has improved, but the complexity of modern architectures and evolving external threats presents new risks that operators must actively manage, according to the Data Center Outage Analysis 2025 from Uptime Institute ...

As observability engineers, we navigate a sea of telemetry daily. We instrument our applications, configure collectors, and build dashboards, all in pursuit of understanding our complex distributed systems. Yet, amidst this flood of data, a critical question often remains unspoken, or at best, answered by gut feeling: "Is our telemetry actually good?" ... We're inviting you to participate in shaping a foundational element for better observability: the Instrumentation Score ...

We're inching ever closer toward a long-held goal: technology infrastructure that is so automated that it can protect itself. But as IT leaders aggressively employ automation across our enterprises, we need to continuously reassess what AI is ready to manage autonomously and what can not yet be trusted to algorithms ...

Much like a traditional factory turns raw materials into finished products, the AI factory turns vast datasets into actionable business outcomes through advanced models, inferences, and automation. From the earliest data inputs to the final token output, this process must be reliable, repeatable, and scalable. That requires industrializing the way AI is developed, deployed, and managed ...

Almost half (48%) of employees admit they resent their jobs but stay anyway, according to research from Ivanti ... This has obvious consequences across the business, but we're overlooking the massive impact of resenteeism and presenteeism on IT. For IT professionals tasked with managing the backbone of modern business operations, these numbers spell big trouble ...

For many B2B and B2C enterprise brands, technology isn't a core strength. Relying on overly complex architectures (like those that follow a pure MACH doctrine) has been flagged by industry leaders as a source of operational slowdown, creating bottlenecks that limit agility in volatile market conditions ...

FinOps champions crucial cross-departmental collaboration, uniting business, finance, technology and engineering leaders to demystify cloud expenses. Yet, too often, critical cost issues are softened into mere "recommendations" or "insights" — easy to ignore. But what if we adopted security's battle-tested strategy and reframed these as the urgent risks they truly are, demanding immediate action? ...