It’s not everyday we are given a chance to get a first-hand look at how one of today’s leading and most advanced enterprises operates its IT stack. That’s why we were very excited when three senior IT executives from Expedia accepted our invitation to participate in a webinar discussing the company’s IT modernization journey.

Imagine the following scenario: A large retailer experiences a major IT incident that impacts their point-of-sale systems. Their on-call engineers are alerted to the issue and begin their work to resolve it immediately. Behind the scenes, teams are collaborating on a fix, but in the storefront, frustration and tension are growing. Customers are complaining about not being able to check out, and in-store personnel have no good answers as to why the outage happened—or when it will be resolved.

Digitalization of business has transformed the world and its industries. Software that upkeep digital initiatives are no longer categorized as a support function. Rather, they are integral to every business process. Modern organizations require infrastructure monitoring tools to detect anomalies and alerting systems to automate remediation processes.

The huge shift to remote work this year has presented many new challenges for IT teams—not least of which is the issue of securing the organization when large numbers of employees are now working at home. At PagerDuty, around a fifth of our employees were already based remotely, but the impact of COVID-19 meant that hundreds of other Dutonians had an almost-overnight switch to working away from the office.

Our reliance on digital services continues to be heightened by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. For work, school, and play, digital remains the primary channel. This puts huge pressure on ITOps and DevOps teams, making it critical that they can collaborate easily to resolve incidents rapidly. Many modern ITOps and DevOps teams rely on one of PagerDuty’s key integration partners, Slack, to meet this need.

Black Friday is one of the biggest days of the year for online consumers and retailers alike. This year, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic is reshaping Black Friday shopping — and digital consumers and retailers must plan accordingly. The coronavirus pandemic will likely cause Black Friday shopping to decline this year. As such, many digital retailers are launching early Black Friday sales, so they can capture consumers’ interest ahead of the competition.

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.