Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Mirco Hering is principal director of APAC DevOps and Agile with Accenture. He supports major public and private sector companies in Australia and overseas in their search for efficient IT delivery. Mirco blogs about IT delivery at NotAFactoryAnymore.com and is author of “DevOps For The Modern Enterprise: Winning Practices to Transform Legacy IT Organizations.”

As organizations embrace a combination of hybrid, multi-cloud, and cloud-native infrastructure to optimize business services, technology teams are struggling to control the chaos of their complex IT environments. IT operators need to piece together availability and performance data across different applications and infrastructure components to truly understand the true health of their enterprise services.

OpsRamp’s recent survey found that 91% of IT operations teams were looking to increase spending with managed service providers (MSPs). The major reasons for working with MSPs to monitor and manage hybrid infrastructure were technical expertise (63%), security know-how (52%), and cost optimization (50%).

Alert management is no longer a manageable task, given the growth in applications, cloud environments and point monitoring tools. Too much time is spent filtering and making sense of alert data and determining where to route incidents. All of these steps slow down critical issue identification and resolution. In this article, I want to discuss a more sensible, modern way to deal with IT alerts, through machine learning intelligence and automation.

In recent weeks we’ve all been disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, both personally and professionally. The changes have been swift and severe, bringing new meaning to the Boy Scout motto: “Be Prepared.” While certain sectors, like the restaurant industry, have been brutally affected by lockdowns, we’ve also seen encouraging signs of last-minute ingenuity. At the end of March, national chain The Cheesecake Factory warned that it would not be able to pay rent.

The world of IT operations is witnessing major changes with the Covid-19 pandemic. Gartner’s recent Business Continuity Survey found that only 12% of organizations were highly prepared to handle the impact of the coronavirus. With technology spend expected to decline by 8% this year, IT leaders will need to prioritize the right technology investments to meet customer, employee, and stakeholder expectations.

Zebra Technologies makes mobile computers, barcode and RFID devices, printers and communications software for healthcare, manufacturing, logistics, retail and other sectors. Despite or maybe even because of Covid-19, the company has a strong outlook; its stock rose 25% in April and is up 16% over the last 52 weeks, according to The Motley Fool. The analyst noted that Zebra’s business process automation technologies help “grease the wheels” of companies during difficult times.