OpsRamp recently conducted a survey on the State of Digital Operations Management in 2021 to understand IT investments in 2021, factors hindering organizational innovation and the steps IT leaders are taking to unleash creativity and growth across the organization. We discussed the survey on a webinar featuring OpsRamp Chief Revenue Officer Sheen Khoury and Isaac Sacolick, president of digital transformation consultancy StarCIO. Here are the key highlights of the conversation.

The 2021 State of the Cloud Report shows that 90 percent of enterprises will increase their public cloud investments this year due to Covid-19. The OpsRamp Spring Release drives faster enterprise cloud migrations with automated monitoring, scalable alerting, powerful visualization, and expanded cloud monitoring coverage. Here are some key benefits of the Spring 2021 Release.

It’s no secret to anyone working in technology that IT’s operating world is becoming more demanding and complex. Digital transformation, hybrid working, exponentially increasing data volumes, greater security risks, and expanding global regulations are all driving up business demands and expectations for reliable and robust technology operations.

Data analytics has always been the foundation to drive actions for IT operations--supporting capacity planning, resource optimization, workload rebalancing, cost projections, and security predictions. But now, there are new demands on IT operations to deliver inclusive data intelligence for managers across IT and the business.

AIOps is fast changing from a technology that was viewed with skepticism to an industry-changing innovation responding to the challenges of managing multifaceted, hybrid IT environments. Recently, our partner Pinnacle Technology Partners (PTP) hosted a panel discussion entitled: “Improving IT Management & Automation with AIOps,” led by Gary Derheim, VP of Managed Services & Marketing at PTP who interviewed executives and technical experts from PTP and OpsRamp.

Hybrid IT is here to stay. As companies are moving to the cloud faster than ever, fueled by necessity during the pandemic, enterprise IT organizations must determine how to shift operations accordingly. Managing highly-distributed, multi-cloud IT environments is the new norm.

It made it into our IT Operations Glossary for 2021 blog last month but got rejected by Wikipedia. Gartner included it in its Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2020 list and business process management software vendor Appian published a book about it. We’re talking about hyperautomation. Wikipedia’s reservations aside, hyperautomation is a technology trend that’s moving beyond the business process management (BPM) world and into IT operations.

IT operations departments in larger enterprises often use 10-15 monitoring tools across different teams to track the health and availability of their core business services. Rather than helping ITOps teams gain a comprehensive view of their infrastructure, an overload of monitoring tools tends to only compound organizational silos and limit insights for incident troubleshooting. Yes, there is too much of a good thing.

Leaders looking to measure the benefits of AIOps and build key performance indicators (KPIs) for both IT and business audiences should focus on key factors such as uptime, incident response, remediation time and predictive maintenance, so that potential outages affecting employees and customers can be prevented. Business KPIs connected to AIOps include employee productivity, customer satisfaction and web site metrics such as conversion rate or lead generation.