The latest News and Information on Incident Management, On-Call, Incident Response and related technologies.
“The way we work has changed forever.” Those are words that our CEO Jennifer Tejada used in her interview with Yahoo Finance a couple of weeks ago. Those words made me stop and think about how much of our customers’ daily work has changed irreversibly. Working from home has changed from a luxury to a necessity, so how do folks in the IT world adapt to this change?
Software services are at the heart of modern business in the digital age. Just look at the apps on your smartphone. Shopping, banking, streaming, gaming, reading, messaging, ridesharing, scheduling, searching — you name it. Society runs on software services. The industry has exploded to meet demands, and people have many choices on where to spend their money and attention. Businesses must compete to attract and retain customers who can switch services with the swipe of a thumb.
The IT landscape is constantly evolving. A tool that is heavily used this month, may be virtually obsolete the next. In a such a dynamic ecosystem, the methods used to implement these tools are unique to every organization. Therefore, it has become crucial for organizations to implement an incident response process that incorporates any combination of tools, even those that are highly siloed and departmental.
People working in IT support and incident management right now are faced with unusual difficulties supporting large remote workforces and managing unpredictable workloads. On Reddit, system admins and other IT pros are bemoaning the hiccups and hassles of working in isolation while trying to resolve issues and maintain high SLAs. You can’t go grab your indispensable SME for troubleshooting, because that person is also home and inundated with messages and alerts from many different tools.
As engineering teams shift from delivering services on monolithic architectures to microservices and even serverless environments, developers are no longer just responsible for creating and maintaining their code. Shared ownership has become the new normal (or at least trending towards) and so they are now responding to production incidents and in some cases in the on-call rotation. Of course incidents vary in terms of impact, but they do take time away from innovation and creating new capabilities.
