More than 80% of organizations have experienced a significant increase in pressure on digital services since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey by PagerDuty.
These same companies cited a 47% increase in the number of daily incidents, resulting in 62% of IT and DevOps practitioners spending more than 10 extra hours per week resolving incidents, compared to six months ago.
The global survey, which involved more than 700 DevOps and IT practitioners across North America, EMEA and APJ, also shows that 40% of organizations expect this digital pressure to get worse in the next six to 12 months.
"The pandemic has irreversibly changed the way we live, work, communicate, learn and shop. We now exist in a digital default world and the stakes are high. Downtime can mean millions in lost revenue and keeping digital services running perfectly is a complex job," said Rachel Obstler, VP of Product at PagerDuty. "This research underscores the fact that every company is facing the challenge of accelerating their digital transformation to keep pace with customer expectations and needs, while grappling with increased digital complexity and strain. It also candidly points to the human cost of this dramatic change — an immense strain on the practitioners charged with keeping digital services running which can lead to massive burnout."
Since the pandemic began, 55% of respondents divulged that they are asked to resolve incidents during their personal time five or more times a week, and 39% say they are firefighting or focused on unplanned work 100% of the time, which leaves no room for proactive, innovative work.
As a result, organizations have had to cancel or delay an average of 7.6 projects in the last three to six months.
Other survey highlights include:
■ The top reason respondents stay at their jobs is because of the teams and the camaraderie in DevOps/IT (71%).
■ 58% said they are grateful for the opportunity to play an integral role in the digital economy.
■ 53% said the pressure to keep digital services running perfectly has reached unprecedented levels in the last 3-6 months.
■ 46% feel overwhelmed when thinking about the next 12 months and feel the volume of work in the future will be significant.
■ 79% believe digital acceleration has to be their company's number one priority in 2021.
■ 51% cite intelligent data and insights that help prioritize where to spend time are critical.
■ 64% believe automation that removes manual processes will be critical to do more with less and meet increased demand on digital services.
■ 69% believe smart integrations are critical to doing their job better.
"As organizations strive to capitalize on the new norm of digital first, they must modernize and automate how they manage their digital operations, because the old approach doesn't work anymore. You need AI and machine learning, and automation, in order to remove complexity and be proactive and predictive," Obstler continued. "Any company that fails to mature their approach, compromises customer experience, employee health, critical projects and risks significantly impacting cost structure."
The Latest
Businesses are embracing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to improve network performance and security, according to a new State of AIOps Study, conducted by ZK Research and Masergy ...
What may have appeared to be a stopgap solution in the spring of 2020 is now clearly our new workplace reality: It's impossible to walk back so many of the developments in workflow we've seen since then. The question is no longer when we'll all get back to the office, but how the companies that are lagging in their technological ability to facilitate remote work can catch up ...
The pandemic accelerated organizations' journey to the cloud to enable agile, on-demand, flexible access to resources, helping them align with a digital business's dynamic needs. We heard from many of our customers at the start of lockdown last year, saying they had to shift to a remote work environment, seemingly overnight, and this effort was heavily cloud-reliant. However, blindly forging ahead can backfire ...
SmartBear recently released the results of its 2021 State of Software Quality | Testing survey. I doubt you'll be surprised to hear that a "lack of time" was reported as the number one challenge to doing more testing, especially as release frequencies continue to increase. However, it was disheartening to see that a lack of time was also the number one response when we asked people to identify the biggest blocker to professional development ...
The role of the CIO is evolving with an increased focus on unlocking customer connections through service innovation, according to the 2021 Global CIO Survey. The study reveals the shift in the role of the CIO with the majority of CIO respondents stating innovation, operational efficiency, and customer experience as their top priorities ...
The perception of IT support has dramatically improved thanks to the successful response of service desks to the pandemic, lockdowns and working from home, according to new research from the Service Desk Institute (SDI), sponsored by Sunrise Software ...
Is your company trying to use artificial intelligence (AI) for business purposes like sales and marketing, finance or customer experience? If not, why not? If so, has it struggled to start AI projects and get them to work effectively? ...
As remote work persists, and organizations take advantage of hire-from-anywhere models — in addition to facing other challenges like extreme weather events — companies across industries are continuing to re-evaluate the effectiveness of their tech stack. Today's increasingly distributed workforce has put a much greater emphasis on network availability across more endpoints as well as increased the bandwidth required for voice and video. For many, this has posed the question of whether to switch to a new network monitoring system ...
When a website or app fails or falters, the standard operating procedure is to assemble a sizable team to quickly "divide and conquer" to find a solution. The details of the problem can usually be found somewhere among millions of log events and metrics, leading to slow and painstaking searches that can take hours and often involve handoffs between experts in different areas of the software. The immediate goal in these situations is not to be comprehensive, but rather to troubleshoot until you find a solution that remedies the symptom, even if the underlying root cause is not addressed ...
Evaluating which products and vendors can meet today's modern and complex IT business requirements is a challenge. To help, I'd like to explore 10 key questions every IT admin should be asking when evaluating or working with network performance tools ...
