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Pandemic Increased Pressure on Digital Services by 80%

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 new study conducted 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 study 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 said 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 3-6 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% of survey respondents said the pressure to keep digital services running perfectly has reached unprecedented levels in the last 3-6 months.

■ 46% of practitioners feel overwhelmed when thinking about the next 12 months and feel the volume of work in the future will be significant.

■ 79% of DevOps and IT practitioners 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."

Methodology: The global survey involved more than 700 DevOps and IT practitioners across North America, EMEA and APJ.

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Pandemic Increased Pressure on Digital Services by 80%

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 new study conducted 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 study 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 said 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 3-6 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% of survey respondents said the pressure to keep digital services running perfectly has reached unprecedented levels in the last 3-6 months.

■ 46% of practitioners feel overwhelmed when thinking about the next 12 months and feel the volume of work in the future will be significant.

■ 79% of DevOps and IT practitioners 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."

Methodology: The global survey involved more than 700 DevOps and IT practitioners across North America, EMEA and APJ.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...