The COVID-19 pandemic is putting unprecedented stress on digital services and websites, with technical incidents doubling since the start of March. Yet new data from PagerDuty indicates IT teams are rising to the challenge, resolving incidents up to 63% faster than before the crisis.
Despite being under significant pressure, high-stress verticals are reacting particularly well. For example, companies in online learning saw incidents grow 11x, but are resolving incidents 39% faster than before the crisis, PagerDuty data shows.
Collaboration services have seen an 8.5x jump in incidents, but are posting 21% faster response times. The entertainment vertical is resolving incidents 63% faster despite a 3x bump in need.
"Companies have shifted into hyper-care mode, knowing that there are more people online than ever before and expectations on digital services are higher than ever," says Rachel Obstler, VP of Product for PagerDuty. "Playing a key role in this hypercare strategy is automated incident response, which allows IT teams to identify, contextualize and resolve the most critical incidents in minutes — despite the surge in digital stress presented by COVID-19."
Hypercare mode, as described by PagerDuty, typically sees IT departments operating in a heightened state of readiness through additional monitoring for top tier services, extra people available on call, and a focus on reliability, scalability and quality of service. This can entail pausing non-essential features or deployments so mission-critical ones perform effectively, reallocating employees from new features to essential "keep the lights on" services and bringing the right signals and contextual data to the right people proactively, so they can get ahead of any slowdowns or errors that could impact the customer if left unchecked.
Obstler concluded, "It's really impressive to see what IT teams are doing 'under the hood' right now to keep customers online and happy. On top of surging digital demand, IT is also having to spin up remote Network Operations Centers, create new processes and virtualize new infrastructure on the fly — all the while with kids and family life at their shoulder."