At the end of 2019, IT pros were making bold predictions about what 2020 would hold. But they weren't bold enough-time makes fools of us all, and hot takes fizzled rather than sizzled. From the continued evolution of smart devices and blockchain's continued rise in prominence to the falling price of compute workloads, there was rational thinking behind the predictions made at the end of 2019.

If there's one thing 2020 has highlighted, it's that the world is constantly changing. For most industries-IT included-one constant spans the ages: a lingering concern about automation. The very thing that helped pave the foundations for the industrial revolution and the world we know today has been a concern ever since, with the worry machines will take our jobs in one way or another. In 2021, we're likely to see the IT industry address this anxiety, embracing automation software solutions in a smarter way and freeing up tech professionals to prioritize the most important jobs.

Raygun has been busy building our best-in-class APM so you can provide flawless digital customer experiences. By adding Raygun Application Performance Monitoring to your monitoring suite, your team will gain more visibility on code and server performance, achieve a faster time to resolution with finer granularity, and reduce infrastructure costs by optimizing existing services. Raygun is a developer-friendly product that surfaces more diagnostic details than other APM solutions. Combined with our usage-based pricing, we have the ability to provide companies like Olo with millions of customers with cost-efficient and powerful APM.

Microsoft Teams is everywhere. Not surprisingly, during the pandemic, the number of daily active users for Teams increased to 75 million in 2020. More and more people are WFH and companies are becoming virtual. Personal meetings are fading now, and Teams poises to become the next best collaboration tool. According to a Riverbed study, 64% of US employees are now working from home because of the Covid pandemic. In turn, Microsoft Teams optimization has become a critical topic for Operations and Network personnel.

2020 was an extremely challenging year for businesses in every industry and in every country across the world. Even those organisations that were able to find a way to continue to operate successfully through the pandemic found that their ways of working were impacted - often negatively - by Covid-19.

Improving front-end performance for a website is known to increase the likelihood that users will engage, enjoy, and continue to use a website. This leads to better business outcomes by improving customers' digital experiences - no-one likes waiting for a slow page to respond. Core Web Vitals are a part of Google's evaluation of a user's overall page experience, and are made up of three specific page speed, user interaction, and page stability measurements: They work together with other web vitals (mobile friendly, free of malware, secure, and low on interstitial popups) to form an overall page experience score signalling to Google that users are having a good experience.

You surf the internet, don't you? While all of us are at home due to Covid lock-down and accepting a new reality, the majority of the work is happening online. IT managers are looking for tools that can track the user digital experience. Executives are reading a report from Gartner or Forrester about some of the best networking monitoring solutions available on the market. Project managers are using Microsoft Teams online to communicate and ensure team members are meeting deliverables on time. Remote employees everywhere use OWA to check their office mails. No matter what, you can be quite sure that everyone is using their favorite browser and search engine for connecting online and accomplish tasks.

For almost as long as there have been computers, there have been people who want to get the information from the computers of others. As such, the history of cybersecurity follows very much step-by-step with the history of modern computing. In 2021, just as computing is an essential part of everyday life, cybersecurity has been a vital investment that every business or organisation needs. When the world's largest companies and even its richest countries' infrastructure can be vulnerable to cybercriminals, it shows that anyone can fall victim to data breaches.