Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Every organization wants to innovate, but the reality is that operational friction can grind even the most ambitious plans to a halt. A delayed response here, an inactionable alert there, and suddenly your engineers are spending more time firefighting than building. Context is scattered across tools, and the “big picture” is lost in a sea of alerts and thumbnail-sized dashboards that provide no context or direction.

The recent outage on June 12 proved yet again that service disruptions are inevitable, it’s not a matter of if, but when? And the next question is: how ready are you when that disruption strikes? What sets successful leaders apart is how quickly they are able to recover. Digital businesses are more complex than ever. Teams are managing sprawling cloud environments, microservices architectures, and a dizzying array of third-party integrations.

AI doesn’t replace teams. It frees them. AI can be viewed as a digital twin, shouldering the manual load, eliminating low-value work and giving people their time back. In network operations, where every second counts and pressure never lets up, AI becomes the way to rise above the pressing workload. The overwhelming workload isn’t due to teams being incapable, but more because they’re buried in busywork.

In the past year alone, we’ve seen just how much a single outage can disrupt and how much stronger teams become when they learn from it. From the July 16, 2024 incident to the widespread June 2025 outage, it’s clear that incidents are inevitable. The question is: how do you transform each disruption into an opportunity to improve your processes for the next one?

June 12 started like any other Wednesday–until the internet broke. It started with Google Cloud’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) system, but the fallout hit everything built on top of it. Widespread service degradation swept across core Google products and third-party platforms. Gmail, Docs, Meet, and Chat went dark. Cloudflare services were unavailable. Developer and AI tools faltered.