This article was originally published in New Stack. More and more companies have gone remote with surprising benefits — a trend that has been building for years. A survey by Global Workplace Analytics and FlexJobs indicates that remote work has grown 91% over the last 10 years, and 159% over the last 15 years. The COVID-19 pandemic has elevated the relevance of remote work (including remote IT operations) to a new level.

Enterprise monitoring tools have traditionally paid attention to the performance of monolithic applications hosted on physical and virtual infrastructure resources. The adoption of cloud native and microservices architectures has brought greater focus to end-user experiences delivered by web applications across different global locations. The bar for a great digital customer experience has never been higher.

To little surprise, online spending in the U.S. has grown 40% since the onset of quarantines in March. A similar trend has played out in other countries: in the UK, online retail spending reached a record high of 30% of total sales in April, according to the Office of National Statistics. If there was ever a solid reason to invest in technologies and people to improve customer experiences (both online and offline) it’s Covid-19.

In the first quarter of 2020, enterprises spent $29 billion on public cloud infrastructure, an increase of 37% over the previous year. While the global economy was battered by the coronavirus pandemic, organizations still rushed to accelerate digital transformation and ensure business continuity with hyperscale infrastructure.

For IT professionals, an enduring outage is one of the worst things that can happen. There goes your credibility, and here comes the executive team enraged and impatient. Now of course, given the distributed, multi-sourced nature of IT infrastructure, some outages are simply not preventable. The details are still emerging from the June 9th outage on IBM Cloud. ITPro Today interviewed Forrester analyst Dave Bartoletti for some mitigation advice.

Neil is Principal Product Manager for Event Management and Automation at OpsRamp. He is a seasoned IT Operations Management veteran with nearly 30 years experience at large enterprises. He discusses the evolution of this critical infrastructure management software market.

We’re excited to announce that OpsRamp is now officially Nutanix Ready Certified as an AHV Integrated Technology Alliance Partner in the Nutanix Elevate Program. Our certified solution lets customers confidently discover, monitor, and automate not only their Nutanix hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) but also their broader hybrid IT environment.

Organizations have doubled down on remote working, digital transformation, and cloud adoption to cope with the sudden onset of a global pandemic. An S&P Global survey in March 2020 found that 41% of enterprises were already “experiencing increased strain on internal IT resources” due to the coronavirus outbreak.

The popular perception of software as a service (SaaS) and cloud computing is beautifully simple: sign-up, login and start doing your work. Of course, this isn’t quite accurate; it all depends on the application, business needs and goals. Enterprise SaaS entails business requirements gathering, customizations, integrations, and training.

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.”