Digital initiatives are on the rise, with spending on the public cloud expected to increase by 18% in 2021. These initiatives are also driving customer service teams towards operational excellence with a focus on customer advocacy and engagement. As more companies embrace the cloud and digital-first operating models, customer service organizations are finding they need to be more proactive in order to create great customer experiences.

At PagerDuty, our 13,500+ customers are the reason we come to work every day.

We recently surveyed 700 DevOps and IT practitioners around the world and found that more than 80% of organizations have experienced a significant increase in pressure on digital services since the start of the pandemic. Compared to 6 months ago, respondents reported a 47% increase in the number of daily incidents, and 62% of DevOps and IT responders work at least an extra 10 hours per week resolving incidents.

2020 has been a year like no other. Our dependency on digital services has reached new heights, leaving many companies trying to accelerate transformation initiatives while simultaneously keeping said digital services running perfectly. The ITOps and DevOps teams on the front line of this struggle are facing more pressure than ever. With the holiday season now in full swing, that strain will only grow as virtual festivities and online shopping pick up the pace.

The financial services sector in Australia has undergone seismic change recently with the rise of neo disruptors and a cashless society driven by the pandemic. Australia is quickly becoming one of the more mature markets to embrace digital transformation, with the federal government announcing it has committed $800 million to a digital infrastructure upgrade. As we move closer to 2021, the financial services sector will continue to see accelerated change and a greater reliance on digital technology.

2020 will go down as one of the hardest years that brick-and-mortar businesses have ever experienced. By the end of March this year, half of the world’s population was estimated to be on “lockdown,” causing an unprecedented shift in priority for businesses from brick-and-mortar stores to ecommerce channels.

Every team has their experts. Maybe you’re the expert for a segment of your team’s applications—the person who’s always called when there’s a problem or when something unexpected happens or when things just look “weird” and the solution isn’t simple. Maybe there’s two of you or even, if you’re lucky, three!

Artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, so a definition of what it is and what it does is difficult to nail down. In an age where digital acceleration is priority zero, companies are evaluating cultural shifts towards new operating models like service ownership to unlock efficiency in a complex world of hybrid cloud environments, AIOps emerges as an attractive potential investment to solve central IT aches and pains.