How is it already near the end of October? We know our retailer customers have been heads-down thinking about code freezes and hypercare during the high season as we approach the holidays. Disruption and pivoting quickly to meet changing customer expectations is nothing new to the retail industry.

Cloud security has become increasingly complex of late. Cloud providers use tens of thousands of APIs, container orchestration systems are growing in number and complexity, and more platforms and services are entering the cloud-native ring. What’s more, each of these components pose a potential security risk to organizations. And it’s you as the customer that’s responsible for the configuration and security of those components.

In a world that’s always on, keeping services up and running isn’t just ideal—it’s mission-critical for all of PagerDuty’s customers. It’s not lost on us that serving as the central nervous system for digital operations at some of the world’s largest companies is no small job.

DevOps and SRE teams are under intense pressure to reduce the mean time to recovery (MTTR) when resolving incidents. With the proliferation of cloud services and the increasing complexity of DevOps toolchains, engineers today need to not only learn how to use these services, but also troubleshoot them when an incident is raised at 2 a.m. The problem is, many incident response processes are still manual today—cobbling together runbooks and ad hoc scripts and orchestrating people to respond.

Like death and taxes, IT incidents are inevitable. Issues like server outages and broken code are common—and costly. A single hour of downtime costs businesses more than $300,000 on average, according to Gartner. That’s why a solid incident management strategy is a must for any organization. “People solve incidents, but we can’t do it alone,” says Ali Rayl, Slack’s vice president of customer experience.

We are super excited to share that we are currently testing and in the process of rolling out a new desktop global navigation to all of our users. Things that are clear in retrospect often emerge from ambiguous and humble beginnings. Initially built as a simple on-call management tool for IT responders, PagerDuty has evolved into an end-to-end, enterprise-grade digital operations platform.

Another PagerDuty Summit is in the books, and we’re still coming down from the excitement and energy our customers and community showed us over the past week. We made several big announcements over the course of the conference, but none more significant than the AIOps advancements on our digital operations platform. We introduced a number of ways customers can apply machine learning algorithms and automation to a wide range of workflows across the platform.

There’s no “i” in Teams…but there are two “i’s” in “PagerDuty for Microsoft Teams Meetings.” Sometimes a face-to-face meeting—or its digital equivalent, the video conference—is exactly what’s needed to solve a digital incident that’s constantly evolving. The ability to get key stakeholders together in a single video meeting to discuss an incident can speed up valuable response time and save potential lost revenue.

In 2020, your company is no longer digital-first, you’re very likely digital-only. To your customers, the digital experience is the only experience, and if it isn’t satisfactory they’re going to move on. That puts an increasing amount of pressure on customer service teams.

We are excited to announce PagerDuty’s flexible, one-touch integration with Zoom Video Communications. The integration gives users the ability to create Zoom meetings directly within PagerDuty so teams can instantly assemble face-to-face, share incident details in real time, and orchestrate comprehensive incident response.