Skip to main content

How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 3 covers automation.

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 1

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 2

SELF-LEARNING

IT Operations should move towards "self-learning, self-intelligent and self-remediation" tools more and more, and move away from human involved decisions and executions. This approach requires detection and remediation at the source systems itself. The traditional method of letting the source systems generate alerts on threshold breaches and an external system remediate them may not yield the desired results.
Chandramouleswaran Sundaram
SVP and Head, Infrastructure Services, GAVS Technologies

AUTOMATION

The global pandemic has exposed the need for IT and operations to be able to do more with less. With fewer resources and a smaller margin of error, they are being pressured to deliver robust digital services to both their customers and employees. To meet these needs, automation will become an essential part of IT operations. Automation is no longer a nice-to-have; but a matter of survival. In the past, organizations may have been skeptical about automating their work. But the massive spike in demand for IT services as a result of the pandemic has put increased pressure on traditional IT teams. The only way to scale and deliver new services that are critical to the business is to adopt continuous automation. Automation must be continuous because entity maps and baselines need to be updated continuously — everything needs to be automatically watched, analyzed, and adjusted 24x7. By automating manual-intensive, repetitive tasks, ITOps teams can always stay ahead of rapidly changing customer demands. As a result, they'll also have more time to focus on innovating the customer experience which is especially key in industries, such as retail, where business is taking place mainly online amid the shift to virtual.
Andi Grabner
DevOps Activist, Dynatrace

There's no question that the "new normal" will need to deliver more agile support for remote workers. And this is putting an increasing burden on ITOps teams. In fact, our recent research shows that for 63% of IT professionals, IT workloads have increased 37% since going remote. The best way to cope is to embrace solutions that empower employees to become more self-reliant and deliver hyper-automation. Technology that delivers hyper-automation will allow IT to scale and handle the additional challenges. AI, machine learning and automation bots that will self-heal devices, predict and\or proactively fix issues before they occur will dramatically alleviate IT Ops drain.
Rex McMillan
Principal Product Manager, Ivanti

Read Rex McMillan's recent blog on APMdigest: Hyper-Automation - IT's Path to Edge Self-Reliance

IT Ops teams should automate as much as possible. As remote work becomes more normalized, even after the pandemic, IT Ops becomes more difficult — endpoints are no longer easily accessible, yet keeping employees productive remains a priority. Automating necessary tasks, such as patching and fixing endpoint problems, enables employees to work at a high level and frees up time for other IT tasks.
Jeff Harrell
VP of Marketing, Adaptiva

Covid-19 has caused IT priorities to shift. ITOps must now focus on supporting remote workforces, dealing with Zoom, setting up at-home solutions, and so on. But while IT pressures may have changed, business pressures have not; revenue, market share, time to market, and all the traditional metrics of success remain the same. As a result, the need for automation in IT operations has never been greater. Automation helps IT focus on their new priorities while still accommodating for the agility the business demands. When IT can optimize as many processes as possible with automatic, policy-driven workflows, the need for manual intervention and monitoring is eliminated in many areas.
Jeff Kukowski
CEO, CloudBolt

IT automation will play a critical role in the new normal as teams continue to accommodate a dispersed workforce and manage unprecedented service desk pressure. For example, self-service and virtual agent technologies can help offset these workloads by helping to address common issues to boost productivity and free manual labor resources for more complicated issues.
Arun Balachandran
Sr. Marketing Manager, ManageEngine

SELF-SERVICE

Technologies that give the user the power to work more autonomously through self-service will also improve productivity and resilience in this new remote working normal.
Rex McMillan
Principal Product Manager, Ivanti

ITOps can create a catalog of the resources and services that developers need to be productive, and make them easily available with the click of a button. Not only is self-service powered by automation significantly more efficient, but it also reduces unnecessary expenses and cloud cost surges.
Jeff Kukowski
CEO, CloudBolt

THE HYBRID IT PROFESSIONAL

While no one is sure what the new normal will look like, one thing is certain — the world has been cast into the future with alarming speed and accelerated dependence on technology from an individual, enterprise and societal use case. To adapt, the lines between ITOps, Development and Security have to blur, giving rise to the multi-skilled hybrid IT Professional. In the spirit of Site Reliability Engineering, ITOps must adopt an engineering mindset, have a sound understanding of agile software development and groom basic coding skills. The hybrid IT Professional of the new normal enables the creation of Hybrid Product Teams that are multi-skilled, multi-disciplinary and have deep and broad skills. In an effort to work towards advancing the humans of IT through an understanding of the must-have skill sets, please participate in the 2021 Upskilling Survey.
Jayne Groll
CEO, DevOps Institute

Go to: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 4

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...

How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

APMdigest posed the following question to the IT Operations community: How should ITOps adapt to the new normal? In response, industry experts offered their best recommendations for how ITOps can adapt to this new remote work environment. Part 3 covers automation.

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 1

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 2

SELF-LEARNING

IT Operations should move towards "self-learning, self-intelligent and self-remediation" tools more and more, and move away from human involved decisions and executions. This approach requires detection and remediation at the source systems itself. The traditional method of letting the source systems generate alerts on threshold breaches and an external system remediate them may not yield the desired results.
Chandramouleswaran Sundaram
SVP and Head, Infrastructure Services, GAVS Technologies

AUTOMATION

The global pandemic has exposed the need for IT and operations to be able to do more with less. With fewer resources and a smaller margin of error, they are being pressured to deliver robust digital services to both their customers and employees. To meet these needs, automation will become an essential part of IT operations. Automation is no longer a nice-to-have; but a matter of survival. In the past, organizations may have been skeptical about automating their work. But the massive spike in demand for IT services as a result of the pandemic has put increased pressure on traditional IT teams. The only way to scale and deliver new services that are critical to the business is to adopt continuous automation. Automation must be continuous because entity maps and baselines need to be updated continuously — everything needs to be automatically watched, analyzed, and adjusted 24x7. By automating manual-intensive, repetitive tasks, ITOps teams can always stay ahead of rapidly changing customer demands. As a result, they'll also have more time to focus on innovating the customer experience which is especially key in industries, such as retail, where business is taking place mainly online amid the shift to virtual.
Andi Grabner
DevOps Activist, Dynatrace

There's no question that the "new normal" will need to deliver more agile support for remote workers. And this is putting an increasing burden on ITOps teams. In fact, our recent research shows that for 63% of IT professionals, IT workloads have increased 37% since going remote. The best way to cope is to embrace solutions that empower employees to become more self-reliant and deliver hyper-automation. Technology that delivers hyper-automation will allow IT to scale and handle the additional challenges. AI, machine learning and automation bots that will self-heal devices, predict and\or proactively fix issues before they occur will dramatically alleviate IT Ops drain.
Rex McMillan
Principal Product Manager, Ivanti

Read Rex McMillan's recent blog on APMdigest: Hyper-Automation - IT's Path to Edge Self-Reliance

IT Ops teams should automate as much as possible. As remote work becomes more normalized, even after the pandemic, IT Ops becomes more difficult — endpoints are no longer easily accessible, yet keeping employees productive remains a priority. Automating necessary tasks, such as patching and fixing endpoint problems, enables employees to work at a high level and frees up time for other IT tasks.
Jeff Harrell
VP of Marketing, Adaptiva

Covid-19 has caused IT priorities to shift. ITOps must now focus on supporting remote workforces, dealing with Zoom, setting up at-home solutions, and so on. But while IT pressures may have changed, business pressures have not; revenue, market share, time to market, and all the traditional metrics of success remain the same. As a result, the need for automation in IT operations has never been greater. Automation helps IT focus on their new priorities while still accommodating for the agility the business demands. When IT can optimize as many processes as possible with automatic, policy-driven workflows, the need for manual intervention and monitoring is eliminated in many areas.
Jeff Kukowski
CEO, CloudBolt

IT automation will play a critical role in the new normal as teams continue to accommodate a dispersed workforce and manage unprecedented service desk pressure. For example, self-service and virtual agent technologies can help offset these workloads by helping to address common issues to boost productivity and free manual labor resources for more complicated issues.
Arun Balachandran
Sr. Marketing Manager, ManageEngine

SELF-SERVICE

Technologies that give the user the power to work more autonomously through self-service will also improve productivity and resilience in this new remote working normal.
Rex McMillan
Principal Product Manager, Ivanti

ITOps can create a catalog of the resources and services that developers need to be productive, and make them easily available with the click of a button. Not only is self-service powered by automation significantly more efficient, but it also reduces unnecessary expenses and cloud cost surges.
Jeff Kukowski
CEO, CloudBolt

THE HYBRID IT PROFESSIONAL

While no one is sure what the new normal will look like, one thing is certain — the world has been cast into the future with alarming speed and accelerated dependence on technology from an individual, enterprise and societal use case. To adapt, the lines between ITOps, Development and Security have to blur, giving rise to the multi-skilled hybrid IT Professional. In the spirit of Site Reliability Engineering, ITOps must adopt an engineering mindset, have a sound understanding of agile software development and groom basic coding skills. The hybrid IT Professional of the new normal enables the creation of Hybrid Product Teams that are multi-skilled, multi-disciplinary and have deep and broad skills. In an effort to work towards advancing the humans of IT through an understanding of the must-have skill sets, please participate in the 2021 Upskilling Survey.
Jayne Groll
CEO, DevOps Institute

Go to: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 4

Hot Topics

The Latest

According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

Image
Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

In today's fast-paced and increasingly complex network environments, Network Operations Centers (NOCs) are the backbone of ensuring continuous uptime, smooth service delivery, and rapid issue resolution. However, the challenges faced by NOC teams are only growing. In a recent study, 78% state network complexity has grown significantly over the last few years while 84% regularly learn about network issues from users. It is imperative we adopt a new approach to managing today's network experiences ...

Image
Broadcom

From growing reliance on FinOps teams to the increasing attention on artificial intelligence (AI), and software licensing, the Flexera 2025 State of the Cloud Report digs into how organizations are improving cloud spend efficiency, while tackling the complexities of emerging technologies ...