A few months ago, I wrote about PagerDuty’s mission to reimagine the workplace in the wake of COVID-19, and wanted to share an update. When we look back at the last 10 months of work, one thing is clear: We are never going back to “normal.” Though it might sound daunting, I am excited about the opportunity it offers to forge our next normal and to make it a better normal than the one we’ve left.

We’re excited to announce a new set of product updates and enhancements to the PagerDuty platform! Our latest release expands Change Impact Mapping integrations and experiences, gives access to the Visibility dashboard for Business plans, improves on-call processes and analytics, and advances incident response automation so teams can work more efficiently during the moments that matter.

Gaining operational maturity isn’t something that happens overnight after implementing new tools. At its core, it’s a concerted effort in shifting culture so that people can break down communication silos to ship better software and implement more transparent processes.

With the winter holidays fast approaching, many retail businesses are turning their focus to hypercare as they prepare to move goods and services at peak levels. But what is hypercare? Here at PagerDuty, we use the following working definition: Hypercare is the period of time where an elevated level of support is available to ensure the seamless adoption or operation of a system.

Rundeck has now joined forces with PagerDuty. What pulled us together? Our shared vision for improving the work lives of those who run modern digital services. As a co-founder of Rundeck, I’d like to provide my perspective on why Rundeck becoming part of the PagerDuty family is a perfect fit for our collective user communities. No matter if you are on a “you build it, you run it” DevOps team or part of a centralized Ops team—operations work has always been difficult.

Ask most people what they consider to be the core value of the AWS cloud, and they’ll probably include things like AWS’ scalability and flexibility. While this refers to their public cloud offerings, the same can be said about AWS Outposts—and maybe even more so.

Automation is everywhere in our day-to-day IT practices. Many of the processes that have been created for managing hardware and software components were designed, or at least initiated, in a time when managing only a few instances of an application was the norm. When we look at the work required to create, deploy, and maintain applications at a modern scale, the shortcomings of these processes become apparent.

The global pandemic has drastically accelerated digital transformation initiatives and forced organizations to reimagine customer service by having them take on the incident commander role in managing and responding to customer issues and engaging with customers. In addition to prioritizing digital services, many businesses have migrated to the cloud to increase business agility, develop and deliver new features faster, and meet the growing demands of end users.

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.

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.