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Tag: pandemic

Survey Shows Accelerated Shift to Cloud, With Caveats

A survey of 250 IT leaders published by Snow Software, a provider of software asset management software, finds 91% are changing their cloud strategy in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The survey also finds twice as many respondents report they are accelerating cloud migration (45%) and digital transformation (41%) projects versus those putting cloud migration (22%) or digital transformation (21%) initiatives on hold.

At the same time, however, nearly a third of respondents (32%) said they are asking their cloud vendors for extended payment terms, while 31% are renegotiating their cloud contracts. Around 10% of respondents indicated that they would not be able to pay their cloud bills last month.

More than three-quarters of respondents (76%) said they have increased their use of cloud platforms such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and even private clouds.

In addition, more than half of respondents (55%) noted an increase in the use of collaboration tools such as Slack, Teams or Google Chat, while 52% said they have seen an increase in the use of cloud-based videoconferencing software such as Zoom, Cisco WebEx or GoToMeeting.

Overall, 60% of IT leaders said they are continuing to increase cloud use.

Jesse Stockall, chief architect for cloud management for Snow Software, said the results show the cloud has played a critical role in enabling employees to work from home. In many cases, the first thing to be shifted to the cloud was application testing environments. With development teams working from home the only way to effectively set up a testing environment is in the cloud.

At the same time, Stockall said entire applications have been lifted and shifted to the cloud using containers. Rather than refactoring these applications, IT teams decided to encapsulate entire applications in a container that could be deployed on any virtual machine. IT teams then will spend the next few months converting those monolithic applications into a series of microservices that can run natively on cloud computing platforms, he noted.

Stockall expects that approach to lifting and shifting applications first and modernizing them second to accelerate as more organizations conclude working remotely is now part of the new normal. Employees may soon head back into the office, but many more of them increasingly will access applications from home. Business and IT leaders are also unsure whether a second wave of the pandemic might make local offices and data center once again inaccessible, he added.

Many IT organizations will also be replacing legacy virtual private networks (VPNs) with software-defined wide area networks (SD-WANs) to make cloud applications more accessible, Stockall, noted.

The COVID-19 pandemic may prove to be a seminal moment in the history of cloud computing; while cloud computing has been around more than a decade, the bulk of applications still run on-premises. However, once many local data centers became inaccessible overnight, strategies that called for either replacing or modernizing those applications are being accelerated.

It’s not clear how many of those on-premises applications might be retired altogether. Whatever the outcome, there’s never been more focus on where application code is being built and deployed.

June 17, 2020
Report: Confidence in Digital Transformation Lacking

Results of a recent survey conducted by the Corporate Board Member Institute shows a majority of respondents see their organizations’ digital transformation efforts aren’t keeping pace with the current business environment.

The survey polled more than 200 directors of public companies in February, before the global COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, and the results were compared to PwC’s 2020 Global Digital IQ survey. The results show a lack of confidence in digital transformation initiatives—3 out of 5 respondents admitted their company is behind in their digital transformation processes and within the past three years, only 54% had begun their digital transformation processes.

The PwC survey, however, shows the opposite: According to those results, 70% of U.S. executives said their digital transformation is ahead of their competitors. That 70% of executives compared to 35% of directors shows executives are more positive in their company’s progress and maintain a goal-oriented view, said Paula Loop, leader of PwC’s Governance Insight Agency.

The optimism by executives shows that they have confidence in their ability to get things done with digital transformation now, and that they are planning for what is in the present and the near future. The results from directors show a longer-term view—while things currently might not look so good and they say they are behind, they still have the confidence that they can make strides in improving their digital transformation. Directors still believe that they are on or ahead of schedule in other areas such as integrating new technologies into products and services (70%) and training workers for the digital era (67%).

In interviews conducted post-survey, after the pandemic hit, some directors said COVID-19 will accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. “Regardless of where companies were in digital planning, this pandemic has thrust most, if not all, into some form of digital transformation,” Loop said.

Even when faced with a global pandemic, the business continues. Competition isn’t slowing down; it’s time to see whether digital transformation processes will follow suit.

June 17, 2020
AppDynamics Survey Sees Rush to Digital Transformation

A survey of 1,000 IT professionals in organizations with annual revenue of at least $500 million conducted by AppDynamics, a unit of Cisco Systems, finds nearly three-quarters (74%) report digital transformation projects which typically would take more than a year to be approved are now being signed off on in a matter of weeks.

The research also finds 95% of respondents changed their technology priorities during the pandemic, with 88% identifying digital customer experience as being a priority now.

In addition, some 71% said some digital transformation projects have been implemented within weeks versus the months or years it would have taken to implement a similar initiative before the pandemic. At the same time, 66% of respondents noted the pandemic has exposed weaknesses in their digital strategies, creating an urgent need to accelerate initiatives.

Not surprisingly, the survey also finds 81% of respondents said the pandemic has created the biggest technology pressure their organization has ever experienced, with 61% under more pressure at work than ever before. Almost two-thirds (64%) said they are now being asked to perform tasks and activities they have never done before.

Despite the enormous pressure technologists are facing, 87% said this period of time is an opportunity for technology professionals to show their value to the business. In fact, 80% of survey respondents report that the response of their IT teams to the pandemic has positively changed the perception of IT within their organizations.

The survey specifically identifies managing spikes in website traffic (81%), lack of unified visibility and insight into the performance of the technology stack and its impact on customers (80%) and managing mean time to resolution (MTTR) with a remote IT department (70%) as major challenges.

IT teams during this time need clear goals and objectives (90%), real-time data at the point of need (89%), autonomy and accountability (88%) and the freedom to experiment and take risks (87%), the survey finds.

Angie Mistretta, chief marketing officer at AppDynamics, said the survey mirrored an earlier AppDynamics report that tracked a rise in the use of search terms such as “digital experience monitoring” and “application performance management (APM).”

In general, Mistretta said it’s also apparent the rate at which application workloads are moving into the cloud is accelerating as organizations look to deploy more resilient applications based on cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes that are designed from the ground up to access remotely.

It may take time for IT organizations to master cloud-native platforms to deploy microservices-based applications. As such, the number of monolithic applications being lifted and shifted into the cloud remains considerable. Once those applications are shifted, many IT teams will only then start to modernize those applications.

Naturally, AppDynamics is betting many more organizations will require access to an APM platform to navigate this brave new world of legacy and emerging digital business applications in the cloud. The challenge for IT teams, however, is there have never been so many APM options available.

May 28, 2020
Report: Software Delivery Slowed During Pandemic

A survey of more than 500 IT and development professionals conducted by Atlassian finds two-thirds of respondents have slowed down the frequency of software delivery since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Patrick Hill, head of reliability process at Atlassian, said while developers may be creating more code than ever while they work from home, IT operations teams working from home are struggling to keep pace.

In fact, the survey finds more than half of respondents (51%) reported incident response times have been slower since they began working remotely. At the same time, there’s been a 73% increase in demand for the digital services being provided, the survey finds.

It’s too early to say to what degree slowing down the application delivery process might be a byproduct of the “new normal.” It’s more likely that IT operations teams need more time to re-engineer processes to return to the software release levels typically achieved prior to the pandemic, said Hill.

In many cases, IT teams may also need more time to shift toward cloud-based frameworks for managing application release cycles that can be accessed from anywhere. Hill said Atlassian has seen a significant increase in the use of its IT management platforms since March. New signups have increased by approximately 125%, he noted.

It’s also unclear to what degree an application release backlog may be building inside organizations. While developers may be launching more projects, Hill said many of those projects may be only to address bug fixes. As such, it may not take that long for IT operations teams to recover from the disruption caused by the pandemic.

Nevertheless, Hill said most organizations are still coming to terms with the human impact of the pandemic. Many organizations, for example, might not decide to bring IT teams back into the office at all. In fact, there may not be any office to return to—many organizations might conclude there is no need, especially if productivity levels have not declined substantially. No doubt many organizations consequently will be closely monitoring application release cycles in the weeks and months ahead to determine to what impact working from home is having on IT productivity.

Of course, not every member of the IT team is cut out to work from home. While many IT professionals may be introverts by nature, there are also a great many distractions at home that adversely impact productivity. Conversely, some IT professionals might even discover they have begun to work longer hours.

In the meantime, Hill said IT managers would be well-advised to focus more on outcomes than metrics. The amount of code being released in a given week is not likely to be as important as making sure the right code is being released at the right time. With more demand than ever for application services, the greater the need there is for DevOps teams to focus their efforts on the components of an application that make the most critical difference to the business.

May 18, 2020
Coronavirus Impact: Enterprises Must Focus on What Works

As the economic slowdown continues, CIOs, CFOs and enterprise technology teams continue to grapple with frozen budgets and how their enterprise will keep their operations functioning as they attempt to move forward with crucial digital transformation efforts, and possibly shelve those initiatives deemed less critical.

How are CIOs deciding what projects get postponed? Many projects underway now are focused on business continuity and supporting remote work, but that can’t be the only focus for CIOs and enterprise technology leaders.

Miles Ward, CTO at business-technology consultancy SADA Systems, said there is a substantial shift to enable staff to productively work from home, increase flexibility in spending and to automate operations, and rely increasingly on managed services so that demands on operations personnel are reduced.

“Projects outside of those focus areas are going to get deprioritized unless they’re in the very final stages of delivery, where stopping creates more waste than it could prevent,” said Ward.

According to a recent survey from Dresner Advisory Services, 61% of respondents said projects and budgets will be impacted by the pandemic, with sizable majorities reporting the same in Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East, Africa and North America. The biggest impacts are expected to be in operations (manufacturing, supply chain, services) at 89%, executive management at 83%, marketing at 75%, finance at 65%, IT at 60%, research and development at 60% and business intelligence at 56%.

Dresner Advisory Services found that those organizations with more than 5,000 employees expect the lowest level of impact, while organizations with 1,001 to 5,000 reported the highest level of impact.

Jarod Greene, general manager at the Technology Business Management Council, said a great amount of uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 remains, including the rippling health, economic and business impact. It all presents an incredible challenge for all business leaders.

“CIOs and other IT leaders, specifically, are in the thick of this challenge, [and they are] not only responsible for maintaining the continuity of operations and seamless work experiences but also factoring in the short-, mid- and long-term financial impact of their decisions,” said Greene.

Greene contended that CIOs play a vital role in times like these, and that they can help organizations to clearly understand the costs and corresponding value of their technology investments, and therefore can advise business leaders of informed tradeoffs, rather than merely widespread cuts.

“Conversations I’ve had with Technology Business Management Council members over the past days and weeks have focused on re-planning and forecasting and the execution cost optimization exercises—with the ability to measure the impact of those decisions,” said Greene.

Time to Invest in Measurable Impact

For many organizations, the focus has shifted to delivering improved technology experiences to customers.

“The dot-com bubble burst and 9/11 may seem like ancient history to some. These were events that forced businesses to focus on what’s really important: providing value to customers and investing in projects with measurable impact on revenue and cash flow,” said Vaclav Vincalek, partner at business-technology consultancy Future Infinitive.

“The cash shortage refocused management teams on what was vital for their businesses. The current situation will be no different. Business will have to adapt to a new environment and adapt quickly. Companies with well-planned strategies will adjust some tactics. If they’ve already planned for change and aligned with their vision, they’ll continue to succeed with focused execution,” said Vincalek.

Alex Miłowski, platforms researcher and evangelist at Redis Labs, agreed.

“Essential services, especially customer-facing communications systems, are likely to face surges in demand. As such, it is important to meet those demands rather than pull back and postpone,” said Miłowski.

“It very much depends upon what type of business you are in. It’s not all doom and gloom. It hasn’t been for us, or for many of our customers,” added Kevin Grice, director of digital transformation at Trace Solutions. “That said, I think it’s a fair assumption that there will be widening ripple effects through all parts of the economy—so there are likely to be challenges ahead. How big the ripples are, and how long they last, is yet to be seen.”

“Many companies have gone into a temporary lockdown, with a freeze on all development to reduce risk and the possibility of additional costs in a time of reduced cashflow. However, if this emergency goes on for any significant length of time, that approach will soon become unviable. So businesses will have to adapt,” said Grice.

Not all companies have retrenched and have decided to keep moving forward with investments.

“At Laserfiche, we currently do not have any projects on hold, rather, we are working to accelerate any [projects] that are related to business process automation as it helps the workforce. Content management and automation will continue to lead upcoming projects. As IT leaders, we have a responsibility to get things scaled quickly. The challenge we have is being agile and adapting to our ‘new normal,’ but we’re continuing to move forward,” said Thomas Phelps, Laserfiche’s CIO.

Laserfiche isn’t the only company that has decided to keep moving forward. A survey of 317 CFOs, from research firm Gartner, found that 38% of those surveyed don’t have any plans to cut costs, and only 16% of CFOs said they plan to cut IT by more than 10%.

What does Gartner advise enterprises do? Essentially, to do what they are doing: focusing more on what works and cutting the deadweight.

“Where there is excess scope in their organization’s product or service portfolios, the hidden costs of complexity drag down profitability,” Dennis Gannon vice president, advisory at the Gartner’s finance practice said in this statement. “The best CFOs will use COVID-19 as the catalyst to derive significant operating leverage from their most profitable lines of business without destroying value.”

April 30, 2020
Quick Base Makes Free Low-Code Platform Available for First Responders

Quick Base, a provider of a platform for building low-code applications, announced this week that it is making its platform available for free through Sept. 30 to first responder organizations that need to build applications quickly to address the COVID-19 pandemic.

Jay Jamison, chief product and technology officer for Quick Base, said it’s apparent first responders soon will need applications to track things ranging from assets such as ventilators to heat maps that show the number of patients in a geographic area relative to the number of intensive care units (ICUs) available.

Quick Base is also making available templates that can be employed to build the most common types of emergency response applications, such as ones already being employed by the City of New Orleans.

Examples of other applications that will be needed include the ability to track businesses in real-time that may be flouting COVID-19 restrictions or landlords that are evicting tenants despite emergency decrees, noted Jamison.

Most of these applications will need to be developed in days versus weeks or months. To that end, Quick Base is also making available to first responder organizations the expertise of its internal customer success staff as well as third-party consultants, he said.

In addition, Quick Base plans to certify many of these applications for distribution via its online store, which will make it easier for a first responder organization in one locality to leverage an application that has already been developed by another first responder organization.

In general, Jamison said first responder organizations will need to apply DevOps principles across their entire organization to adjust to highly fluid situations. Applications undoubtedly will need to be modified as processes evolve and new emergency decrees are declared, he noted.

The biggest challenge from an IT perspective is many first responder organizations lack the process expertise needed to build an application on the fly. Volunteers with IT expertise will be needed to work alongside medical experts, who will need applications that most likely will be deployed in the cloud but made accessible via a range of mobile computing devices. The chances all those applications will work perfectly when first deployed is almost nil, so timely updates to applications will be critical.

Of course, applications and IT processes are not always the first things that come to mind to combat a pandemic. However, the faster first responders can respond to changing conditions on the ground, the more lives that might potentially be saved. In some large cities, it’s probable first responders already have access to a range of applications that to vary degrees might scale to meet the current challenge. However, in smaller localities, the availability of such applications is nominal at best.

Quick Base is not the only provider of low-code and no-code tools for building applications, so there are plenty of options for building applications quickly. Whichever the platform employed, time is going to be of the essence. Outbreaks in Italy, Spain and China have already shown how quickly events can spiral out of control. If any new application is going to be relevant in any other emerging CIVID-19 hot zone, the work to build that application needs to start immediately.

— Mike Vizard

March 25, 2020
New Relic Gives COVID-19 Relief Agencies Free 90-day Access

New Relic will provide free access to the entire New Relic One observability platform for 90 days to any organization engaged in COVID-19 pandemic relief efforts that have a specific benefit to the public.

Erin Dieterich, director of corporate social responsibility at New Relic, said it’s apparent that the IT platforms of both nonprofits and private companies that are lending their services and expertise to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic will be taxed in unexpected ways.

To help IT teams rise to that challenge, New Relic will make it possible to identify both software and infrastructure issues that are having an adverse impact on applications, noted Dieterich. Those issues undoubtedly will be experienced by both non-profit organizations as well as private companies trying to leverage their existing IT environment to make additional digital services available. Examples of organizations beyond those providing humanitarian aid that are being invited to register to use New Relic One via NewRelic.org include public and private schools and other providers of education services.

New Relic also has a crisis management team in place to make sure the New Relic One service is not disrupted as the company’s own employees work from home across multiple geographies.

Many of the providers of COVID-19 relief services are likely to find their efforts stymied at some point by IT issues. As IT environments have become more intertwined in the age of the cloud, it’s become difficult to ascertain the root cause of any application performance issue. Platforms such as New Relic One provide access to a cloud service through which IT teams can more easily pinpoint where a specific issue is potentially creating a wave of downstream application issues that would not be obvious to the average IT administrator.

Beyond the teams of employees New Relic already allocates to New Relic.org on a full-time basis, Dieterich said the company is tapping volunteers from its own base of employees. Many of those employees themselves are now working from home, much like most of the rest of the global workforce.

It’s too early to say to when the COVID-19 pandemic might subside, so New Relic plans to re-evaluate this initiative three months from now. In the meantime, the company has also pledged to make available $100,000 to match employee contributions to COVID-19 relief efforts.

In the days and months ahead relief agencies of all sizes are going to be put to the ultimate test. While most of the focus is now on health care, it’s clear the COVID-19 pandemic also represents a major economic disruption. IT expertise will be needed to augment relief efforts spanning everything from tracking coronavirus cases to making sure people who are out of work receive food assistance. IT expertise that enables relief agencies to access public and private funding as quickly as possible is likely to be among some of the most important tasks ahead, regardless of whether anyone realizes today or much less even appreciates it tomorrow.

— Mike Vizard

March 25, 2020