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4 IT Strategies for Success During the Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, top-tier enterprises were 2.6 times as likely to have grown revenue, 2.5 times as likely to have reached profit goals and 2.1 times as likely to have high employee satisfaction numbers, according to 2020 CIO Survey Report: Adjusting to Remote Work and the New Normal, a new Catchpoint survey of 200 enterprise CIOs and 200 enterprise work-from-home (WFH) managers.


Before COVID-19 hit, roughly one in three (33 percent) American enterprise employees worked from home at least some of the time. During the pandemic, this increased to three in four (74 percent).

In terms of engaging with customers, prior to the pandemic, less than half (43 percent) of customer engagements were face-to-face. During the pandemic, this dropped to just one in eight (13 percent).

The COVID-19 pandemic has been tough on most enterprises. The survey shows that the 3 biggest impacts on businesses were profitability, revenue growth and productivity. Within IT departments, the biggest impacts were security, app reliability and network availability.

"When it comes to today's Digital Workplace, reliable performance is critical for employee productivity and morale, and with a fast-increasing number of employees working from home, systems are more prone to reliability, availability and performance issues affecting remote workers," said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO at Catchpoint. "The ability to measure, visualize and proactively react to outages and slowdowns can deliver a 1st class digital employee experience."

Not every enterprise had the same experience and some did surprisingly well during the pandemic. To see the differences, the survey divided the responses into three tiers. Top tier are organizations that performed the best in terms of business and IT metrics and bottom tier performed the worst. Catchpoint then compared the top and bottom tiers to explore those differences and what the top tier was doing differently.

The survey found 4 keys to top-tier enterprises' impressive results:

1. Focus on Reliability

The top tier is fully committed to reliability. Nearly all (91 percent) of the top tier has implemented a formal site reliability engineering methodology (SRE). This compares to just 69% of bottom-tier organizations.

2. Focus on Work-from-Home Tech Stack

The top tier is committed to making Work-from-Home (WFH) employees as productive as possible. For example, the top tier is 33 percent more likely to train their employees on work-from-home technologies.

The top tier also does a better job of equipping their WFH employees — nearly 3X as likely to say their employees' collaboration tools are extremely effective.

3. General Networking Initiatives

Top-tier organizations are more engaged with cutting- edge initiatives that optimize remote work. For example, top-tier are 1.8 times as likely to be involved with robotic process automation.

4. Security Initiatives

Finally, top-tier organizations are also more engaged with cutting-edge security initiatives. Top-tier reported being 1.4 times as likely to be involved with better security management and working with software-defined perimeters.

Methodology: Catchpoint commissioned ReRez Research of Dallas, TX to conduct the survey. CIOs and managers came from enterprises with at least 1,000 employees and were geographically dispersed across the United States and comprised a wide range of industries. Enterprise managers surveyed worked from home during the crisis and used a computer for 50 percent or more of their day.

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4 IT Strategies for Success During the Pandemic

During the COVID-19 pandemic, top-tier enterprises were 2.6 times as likely to have grown revenue, 2.5 times as likely to have reached profit goals and 2.1 times as likely to have high employee satisfaction numbers, according to 2020 CIO Survey Report: Adjusting to Remote Work and the New Normal, a new Catchpoint survey of 200 enterprise CIOs and 200 enterprise work-from-home (WFH) managers.


Before COVID-19 hit, roughly one in three (33 percent) American enterprise employees worked from home at least some of the time. During the pandemic, this increased to three in four (74 percent).

In terms of engaging with customers, prior to the pandemic, less than half (43 percent) of customer engagements were face-to-face. During the pandemic, this dropped to just one in eight (13 percent).

The COVID-19 pandemic has been tough on most enterprises. The survey shows that the 3 biggest impacts on businesses were profitability, revenue growth and productivity. Within IT departments, the biggest impacts were security, app reliability and network availability.

"When it comes to today's Digital Workplace, reliable performance is critical for employee productivity and morale, and with a fast-increasing number of employees working from home, systems are more prone to reliability, availability and performance issues affecting remote workers," said Mehdi Daoudi, CEO at Catchpoint. "The ability to measure, visualize and proactively react to outages and slowdowns can deliver a 1st class digital employee experience."

Not every enterprise had the same experience and some did surprisingly well during the pandemic. To see the differences, the survey divided the responses into three tiers. Top tier are organizations that performed the best in terms of business and IT metrics and bottom tier performed the worst. Catchpoint then compared the top and bottom tiers to explore those differences and what the top tier was doing differently.

The survey found 4 keys to top-tier enterprises' impressive results:

1. Focus on Reliability

The top tier is fully committed to reliability. Nearly all (91 percent) of the top tier has implemented a formal site reliability engineering methodology (SRE). This compares to just 69% of bottom-tier organizations.

2. Focus on Work-from-Home Tech Stack

The top tier is committed to making Work-from-Home (WFH) employees as productive as possible. For example, the top tier is 33 percent more likely to train their employees on work-from-home technologies.

The top tier also does a better job of equipping their WFH employees — nearly 3X as likely to say their employees' collaboration tools are extremely effective.

3. General Networking Initiatives

Top-tier organizations are more engaged with cutting- edge initiatives that optimize remote work. For example, top-tier are 1.8 times as likely to be involved with robotic process automation.

4. Security Initiatives

Finally, top-tier organizations are also more engaged with cutting-edge security initiatives. Top-tier reported being 1.4 times as likely to be involved with better security management and working with software-defined perimeters.

Methodology: Catchpoint commissioned ReRez Research of Dallas, TX to conduct the survey. CIOs and managers came from enterprises with at least 1,000 employees and were geographically dispersed across the United States and comprised a wide range of industries. Enterprise managers surveyed worked from home during the crisis and used a computer for 50 percent or more of their day.

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As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

Regardless of OpenShift being a scalable and flexible software, it can be a pain to monitor since complete visibility into the underlying operations is not guaranteed ... To effectively monitor an OpenShift environment, IT administrators should focus on these five key elements and their associated metrics ...