ROI might be one of the most popular business acronyms in recent memory, and business to business, the definition remains the same: return on investment. No matter the industry, leaders are concerned with ROI and ensuring that every dollar spent is used in the best interest of the organization. But in practice, what does ROI really mean? Let’s discuss!

In the world of always-on services, many organizations have taken the path to modernize their IT operations to provide greater agility, lower cost, and most importantly, to deliver frictionless digital customer experiences. Is your DevOps team deploying more frequently than operations can support? Are you struggling to keep up with the maintenance issues associated with aging software? Modernizing your IT operations can be the key to overcoming these complexities.

Although IT incidents have always been a concern, the increase in customer-facing technology adds the cost of a bad customer experience to the cost of responding to and remediating an incident. While in a perfect world, you’d be able to prevent incidents from happening in the first place, the reality is they do happen and more often than most of us would like to admit.

When an incident strikes, an organization’s reputation and revenue, as well as customer trust are at stake. Assembling an effective incident response team is critical to minimizing the incident’s impact. But what exactly is an incident response team? Who should be a part of the team and what are their responsibilities? Successful incident responses require a team with a diverse set of problem-solving and communication skills.

With Halloween behind us and the holiday shopping season fast approaching, engineering and product teams know what that means: code freezes! At xMatters, code freezes are a part of our product release process in anticipation of the busiest — and most important — time of the year for many of our customers. But code freezes are just one piece of the puzzle in how we ensure our customers have the most reliable experiences. The way our product releases are designed is much more than that.

As infrastructure stacks grow increasingly complex and involve an ever-growing number of services, system failures are becoming more and more common. There can be a variety of reasons why systems fail: software bugs, misconfiguration or interactions between services that cause unexpected behavior, the network is down, and of course, those rare occasions where natural events can render data centers inoperative.

The concept and development of DevOps have significantly changed the way IT teams work in the last decade. Small and large teams alike can see the difference when they switch from traditional software development cycles to a DevOps cycle: accelerated innovation, improved collaboration, faster time to market. And the list of benefits continues to grow. To effectively embrace DevOps, however, is not an easy task. Thankfully, there are ways to navigate this challenging journey.

xMatters is a crucial tool for DevOps teams, and no one knows that better than our customers. Over the years we’ve published countless DevOps case studies, but when it comes to the test of time, some have stood up and have continued to make an impact.