Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This is part two in our blog series on Digital Transformation during Covid-19. You can read the first blog here. The global pandemic and subsequent lockdowns affecting over half the world’s population are already affecting digital transformation, on both an organizational and employee level. Starting by improving your internal customer experience is a good first step, after which digital transformation efforts can and should focus on enhancing the external customer experience in every way.

In the new normal of the COVID-19 pandemic, a spare room is an office, a handshake is a threat, and a full shelf of toilet paper at the grocery store is nothing short of a miracle. In these unusual times, IT teams are stepping up and stepping outside their job description to help their users adapt to the shifting landscape in which we live and work.

Work, education, and even many of our leisure activities have all moved on-line at an incredible pace due to current social distancing mandates. The digital backbone of the Internet and the SaaS services that drive our personal and professional lives are now foundational. Ensuring that these systems are operating optimally and securely is of paramount importance.

In September 2019, IBM released z15 and LinuxONE III, the most secure cloud environment in the market featuring pervasive encryption built-in at its core with Ubuntu. This offered a solid foundation to launch hardened security offerings for the mainframe across platforms such as MongoDB, Postgres, IDAA, IBM Cloud Private and the IBM Hyper Protect services family.

I recently joined Stackery from Puppet: a company that specializes in great automation software for the globe’s biggest enterprise IT operations teams. I had the privilege of learning from folks doing the best work of their life to automate the provisioning, configuration, and maintenance of infrastructure that enables teams of developers to move fast and make a difference for their business.

Today, Stackery is announcing enhanced security and continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) capabilities that enable teams to automate delivery best practices from laptop to production. With additional audit capabilities, scoped IAM permissions, and secrets management for automated verification and deployment pipelines, Stackery helps teams scale serverless usage and accelerate modernization and innovation projects.

“Pandemic response experience” is not the first line you’d expect to see on a CIO’s resume. As a deadly new virus spread across the world in recent weeks, however, IT leaders everywhere have been scrambling to ensure their employees stay safe, connected and productive. At the same time, we all need to protect top line revenues, ensure the customer experience doesn’t miss a beat, and avoid any disruption to customer operations.

In light of COVID-19 related office closures, one thing we’ve seen and heard repeatedly is the “abandoned NOC.” People that are responsible for finding, escalating and resolving problems in your infrastructure and applications quickly are now having to work very differently. Two-minute hallway conversations are replaced with time-consuming emails, Slack, and virtual calls.

Just recently, the World Health Organization declared coronavirus a global pandemic. This decision brought with it several health and safety measures, and normal life came to a halt in many countries. This resulted in many organizations around the world adopting telecommuting methods to prevent the spread of COVID-19. While people are adjusting to the sudden changes in the way they work, cybercriminals are using this opportunity to exploit new vulnerabilities the work-from-home environment presents.

What is the most important feature an Express.js application can have? Maybe using sockets for real-time chats or GraphQL instead of REST APIs? Come on, tell me. What’s the most amazing, sexy, and hyped feature you have in your Express.js application? Want to guess what mine is? Optimal performance with minimal downtime. If your users can’t use your application, what’s the point of fancy features?