Well, hello 2021: are you going to be good to me? In conversations with family, friends and coworkers, most are cautiously optimistic that with vaccines being rolled out things will start to return to some semblance of normalcy in a few months. Meanwhile, there is much work to be done. Enterprise IT managers and leaders always have big mandates and in 2020, those expectations exploded. Technology, after all, has been everyone’s lifeline during the pandemic.

The new year is all about fresh starts, and certainly all of us need that. Still, it's useful to look back and review the events of the previous year. Here are some highlights of OpsRamp's company and product news in 2020.

During times of great uncertainty, leaders are always tested in ways they never imagined. Can they effectively surmount the external threats to the organization while keeping people committed and engaged with priorities? Back in March 2020, leaders were reacting — as swiftly as they could. Many were positive that the pandemic would disappear as quickly as it appeared and business and personal life would go back to normal.

There was nothing predictable about 2020, and even though 2021 seems equally unpredictable – we mortals enjoy holding up the crystal ball as the year ends. At the moment, we can predict that those who want the Covid-19 vaccine in the United States will be able to get it in the next 6-8 months. We can also predict that working remotely will continue to be a major trend in 2021. We can predict that politics will continue to be deeply divided in the United States.

OpsRamp customer BJ’s Wholesale Club is enhancing and reshaping how its customers buy essential goods during a year like no other. When it comes to consumer goods, the year 2020 has been all about essentials. Consumers have stocked up on groceries and household supplies such as toilet paper and cleaning products, fitness wear for working comfortably from home and of course electronics, to stay connected.

Dave Widener is CTO of MyHealthMath, a provider of health plan decision support tools which simplify every aspect of open enrollment. Widener is executive leader for the company's entire technology function including R&D, strategic planning, cybersecurity, and technical product execution. Widener’s career encompasses IT management and leadership roles in the energy, life sciences, consumer products and banking sectors.

Across the IT community, there is a buzz around the SaaSOps movement, and it has been consistently gaining momentum. As David Politis of BetterCloud describes it: “SaaSOps is a practice referring to how Software as a Service (SaaS) applications are managed and secured through centralized and automated operations (Ops), resulting in reduced friction, improved collaboration, and better employee experience”.

IT Ops and DevOps people live by metrics – but not all metrics are the same. These days, setting and achieving meaningful service level indicators (SLIs), which translate to service level objectives (SLOs) is a desirable target for many IT pros. Meaningful SLOs have a tight connection with real-world user experiences, versus arbitrary metrics that may distract teams from the root cause of an issue.

IT automation is growing in adoption this year as IT organizations grapple with constantly changing priorities, the pressure of supporting large remote workforces and tight resources. However, IT teams are hesitant to deploy automation workflows on production infrastructure that supports important business applications and services. Trust is an issue – but errors do occur. Unsupervised automation can sometimes create more problems by missing the actual context for issue resolution.

Onboard, monitor, and optimize your cloud and cloud-native infrastructure within 30 minutes or less. Are you one of those amazing IT operations professionals who worked hard to migrate enterprise workloads to the public cloud during the pandemic? Your team then probably built hundreds of tags for different types of cloud resources for the right levels of visibility and governance across cost optimization, chargeback, and reporting.