How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 5

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 5, the final installment in the series, covers open source and emerging technologies.

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

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

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

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

OPEN SOURCE

Although 2020 has been a year of change, ITOps teams have been building for scale for quite some time, and our teams have become more distributed than ever. By utilizing new capabilities in cloud native architectures, where observability is embedded in our open source stacks teams have more options than ever. Open source is the new normal.
Jonah Kowall
CTO, Logz.io

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

We should ensure the teams are up to date with new emerging technologies. While the new norm influences our physical presence, technology continues to progress and we want our team to have the ability to learn, develop and find ways to advance the organization (and themselves) by leveraging new technologies and solutions. The organization should assist the Ops engineers in being up to date from this perspective as well.
Ziv Oren
Chief Delivery Officer, Aqua Security

SAAS

The new normal already has large parts of the workforce WFH and away from the office. ITOps teams will continue to focus on organizational solutions that provide stability and easy integration into pre-existing environments. This gives an advantage to SaaS solutions, which can be updated remotely, typically with high uptimes.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

PUBLIC CLOUD IAAS

COVID-19 has dramatically amplified several existing trends and needs across teams. For ITOps, I think it has shown the importance of the move to Public Cloud IaaS — which means a reduction in their role, but it's the only route to scale/reliability. Where ITOps do still run systems, the mass migration to remote working has forever changed the infrastructure needs and cadence of evolution. Although most of what the team does can be done remotely, as everyone has moved to WFH, there is a considerable impact on the SREs and ITOps teams that manage the infrastructure data centers. They need to work in capsules to not to infect each other and maintain a working force that physically administers the data center. All clouds are basically physical servers that need maintenance at the end of the day.
Avishai Sharlin
Division President, Amdocs Technology

SDWAN

One key to navigating these challenging times is for ITOps to look at underlying network infrastructure to make sure it can handle the evolving demands of the business, and then plan a network upgrade in a way that's not disruptive to the business. Many organizations have turned to SD-WAN as the answer — and rightly so, because it provides a way to control application performance while centralizing and simplifying network and resource management. However, pretty much all SD-WAN vendors require an overhaul of the network infrastructure in order to implement, which is time-consuming, costly, disruptive, and slow to deliver results. Our recommendation is that ITOps consider a solution that doesn't require re-engineering of the network. Take advantage of transparent hybrid technologies in order to gain the application performance and network management benefits of SD-WAN immediately (rather than the typical 6-18+ months you'd be looking at with most solutions), without having to re-architect the network. The ideal SD-WAN solution enables a « hands-free » migration, which involves placing a device that is essentially invisible to the network and delivers instant end-to-end application visibility and control. Meanwhile, the business can migrate to a complete SD-WAN at their own pace, avoiding the risk, disruption, and delayed ROI associated with a complex network project. Additionally, the enterprise should consider whether an SD-WAN solution offers multi-cloud capabilities and supports work from home scenarios, because in the long term ,the network edge is expanding beyond the physical boundaries of the corporate perimeter. Lastly, cost flexibility is essential; the enterprise should insist on consumption-based pricing models in order to control costs and maintain flexibility as they grow or shift workloads and sites up or down. Ultimately, ITOps needs a network that can grow and scale with the business, as they adapt to unpredictable circumstances facing their business today and beyond.
Zabrina Doerck
Director of Product Marketing, Infovista

FULL-STACK SCALABILITY

The move to 100% remote ITOps underscores the importance of reliable, scalable, automatable infrastructure up and down the stack. Every part of your application stack, particularly the oft-overlooked foundational parts (think: servers, load balancers, VPNs, DNS), need to be just as agile and easy to deploy, update, and scale as your core application. This will enable you to react to changing business needs rapidly. The ability to scale your internal back-office application by 10x in 10 minutes is fantastic, but if none of your employees can access the system because your VPNs are overloaded, you've got a problem. Take the opportunity to look at every piece of software and hardware that powers your business and ask: "How agile and fragile is this?" "How does it scale?" "How can it be automated?" Because when it comes time to deliver on new goals and KPIs in the future, companies that have invested in making their entire stack more reliable and scalable will have a massive advantage.
Jonathan Sullivan
CTO, NS1

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How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 5

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 5, the final installment in the series, covers open source and emerging technologies.

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

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

Start with: How ITOps Can Adapt to the New Normal - Part 3

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

OPEN SOURCE

Although 2020 has been a year of change, ITOps teams have been building for scale for quite some time, and our teams have become more distributed than ever. By utilizing new capabilities in cloud native architectures, where observability is embedded in our open source stacks teams have more options than ever. Open source is the new normal.
Jonah Kowall
CTO, Logz.io

EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES

We should ensure the teams are up to date with new emerging technologies. While the new norm influences our physical presence, technology continues to progress and we want our team to have the ability to learn, develop and find ways to advance the organization (and themselves) by leveraging new technologies and solutions. The organization should assist the Ops engineers in being up to date from this perspective as well.
Ziv Oren
Chief Delivery Officer, Aqua Security

SAAS

The new normal already has large parts of the workforce WFH and away from the office. ITOps teams will continue to focus on organizational solutions that provide stability and easy integration into pre-existing environments. This gives an advantage to SaaS solutions, which can be updated remotely, typically with high uptimes.
Russell Rothstein
Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

PUBLIC CLOUD IAAS

COVID-19 has dramatically amplified several existing trends and needs across teams. For ITOps, I think it has shown the importance of the move to Public Cloud IaaS — which means a reduction in their role, but it's the only route to scale/reliability. Where ITOps do still run systems, the mass migration to remote working has forever changed the infrastructure needs and cadence of evolution. Although most of what the team does can be done remotely, as everyone has moved to WFH, there is a considerable impact on the SREs and ITOps teams that manage the infrastructure data centers. They need to work in capsules to not to infect each other and maintain a working force that physically administers the data center. All clouds are basically physical servers that need maintenance at the end of the day.
Avishai Sharlin
Division President, Amdocs Technology

SDWAN

One key to navigating these challenging times is for ITOps to look at underlying network infrastructure to make sure it can handle the evolving demands of the business, and then plan a network upgrade in a way that's not disruptive to the business. Many organizations have turned to SD-WAN as the answer — and rightly so, because it provides a way to control application performance while centralizing and simplifying network and resource management. However, pretty much all SD-WAN vendors require an overhaul of the network infrastructure in order to implement, which is time-consuming, costly, disruptive, and slow to deliver results. Our recommendation is that ITOps consider a solution that doesn't require re-engineering of the network. Take advantage of transparent hybrid technologies in order to gain the application performance and network management benefits of SD-WAN immediately (rather than the typical 6-18+ months you'd be looking at with most solutions), without having to re-architect the network. The ideal SD-WAN solution enables a « hands-free » migration, which involves placing a device that is essentially invisible to the network and delivers instant end-to-end application visibility and control. Meanwhile, the business can migrate to a complete SD-WAN at their own pace, avoiding the risk, disruption, and delayed ROI associated with a complex network project. Additionally, the enterprise should consider whether an SD-WAN solution offers multi-cloud capabilities and supports work from home scenarios, because in the long term ,the network edge is expanding beyond the physical boundaries of the corporate perimeter. Lastly, cost flexibility is essential; the enterprise should insist on consumption-based pricing models in order to control costs and maintain flexibility as they grow or shift workloads and sites up or down. Ultimately, ITOps needs a network that can grow and scale with the business, as they adapt to unpredictable circumstances facing their business today and beyond.
Zabrina Doerck
Director of Product Marketing, Infovista

FULL-STACK SCALABILITY

The move to 100% remote ITOps underscores the importance of reliable, scalable, automatable infrastructure up and down the stack. Every part of your application stack, particularly the oft-overlooked foundational parts (think: servers, load balancers, VPNs, DNS), need to be just as agile and easy to deploy, update, and scale as your core application. This will enable you to react to changing business needs rapidly. The ability to scale your internal back-office application by 10x in 10 minutes is fantastic, but if none of your employees can access the system because your VPNs are overloaded, you've got a problem. Take the opportunity to look at every piece of software and hardware that powers your business and ask: "How agile and fragile is this?" "How does it scale?" "How can it be automated?" Because when it comes time to deliver on new goals and KPIs in the future, companies that have invested in making their entire stack more reliable and scalable will have a massive advantage.
Jonathan Sullivan
CTO, NS1

Related Links

Hot Topics

The Latest

What's Blocking Scalable AI?

For all the attention AI receives in corporate slide decks and strategic roadmaps, many businesses are struggling to translate that ambition into something that holds up at scale. At least, that's the picture that emerged from a recent Forrester study commissioned by Tines ...

Not All Networks Are Built for the Edge

From smart factories and autonomous vehicles to real-time analytics and intelligent building systems, the demand for instant, local data processing is exploding. To meet these needs, organizations are leaning into edge computing. The promise? Faster performance, reduced latency and less strain on centralized infrastructure. But there's a catch: Not every network is ready to support edge deployments ...

Why Observability Is the Missing Piece in Your Business Growth

Every digital customer interaction, every cloud deployment, and every AI model depends on the same foundation: the ability to see, understand, and act on data in real time ... Recent data from Splunk confirms that 74% of the business leaders believe observability is essential to monitoring critical business processes, and 66% feel it's key to understanding user journeys. Because while the unknown is inevitable, observability makes it manageable. Let's explore why ...

Gartner: Regular AI System Assessments Triple the Likelihood of High GenAI Value

Organizations that perform regular audits and assessments of AI system performance and compliance are over three times more likely to achieve high GenAI value than organizations that do not, according to a survey by Gartner ...

Beyond Autoscaling: What True Kubernetes Optimization Actually Requires

Kubernetes has become the backbone of cloud infrastructure, but it's also one of its biggest cost drivers. Recent research shows that 98% of senior IT leaders say Kubernetes now drives cloud spend, yet 91% still can't optimize it effectively. After years of adoption, most organizations have moved past discovery. They know container sprawl, idle resources and reactive scaling inflate costs. What they don't know is how to fix it ...

Is Your Network Ready for the AI Boom? 5 Overlooked Stress Points

Artificial intelligence is no longer a future investment. It's already embedded in how we work — whether through copilots in productivity apps, real-time transcription tools in meetings, or machine learning models fueling analytics and personalization. But while enterprise adoption accelerates, there's one critical area many leaders have yet to examine: Can your network actually support AI at the speed your users expect? ...

Keeping Your Business Stable When Going Through an IT Disaster

The more technology businesses invest in, the more potential attack surfaces they have that can be exploited. Without the right continuity plans in place, the disruptions caused by these attacks can bring operations to a standstill and cause irreparable damage to an organization. It's essential to take the time now to ensure your business has the right tools, processes, and recovery initiatives in place to weather any type of IT disaster that comes up. Here are some effective strategies you can follow to achieve this ...

How Engineers Can Use AIOps to Innovate Their Infrastructure

In today's fast-paced AI landscape, CIOs, IT leaders, and engineers are constantly challenged to manage increasingly complex and interconnected systems. The sheer scale and velocity of data generated by modern infrastructure can be overwhelming, making it difficult to maintain uptime, prevent outages, and create a seamless customer experience. This complexity is magnified by the industry's shift towards agentic AI ...

MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Podcast - Episode 19: The AWS Outage

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 19, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA explains the cause of the AWS outage in October ... 

Cloud Migration Delays Are Putting Businesses at Risk

The explosion of generative AI and machine learning capabilities has fundamentally changed the conversation around cloud migration. It's no longer just about modernization or cost savings — it's about being able to compete in a market where AI is rapidly becoming table stakes. Companies that can't quickly spin up AI workloads, feed models with data at scale, or experiment with new capabilities are falling behind faster than ever before. But here's what I'm seeing: many organizations want to capitalize on AI, but they're stuck ...