As Covid-19 restrictions and predictions march on unabatedly, people are starting to think about what may be long-lasting changes to industries. The tech industry is a mixed bag: it all depends on your perspective. Layoffs are becoming commonplace, especially in BtoC tech startups: Lyft and AirBnB recently announced massive cuts. The giants-- which include the usual suspects Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple, Netflix--are faring remarkably well, as discussed in a recent New York Times op-ed.

IT leaders need a well-defined strategy for managing patches and upgrades for software applications and technologies. Planned patch management rollouts help combat security vulnerabilities as unpatched systems are highly vulnerable to data breaches and attacks from hackers. During Covid-19, IT organizations have struggled to keep systems updated using remote teams, especially as software vendors have recently released a record number of patch fixes and upgrades.

Today we share a recent conversation with Mike Kavis, Chief Cloud Architect at Deloitte Consulting. Mike has held numerous technical roles such as CTO, Chief Architect, and VP positions with over 30 years of experience in software development and architecture. He led a team that built the world's first high speed transaction network in Amazon's public cloud and won the 2010 AWS Global Startup Challenge.

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.

In our recent Tech Talk, Agentless Monitoring and Custom Monitors, OpsRamp’s Curt Thorin explained how agentless and custom monitoring are critical for distributed IT operations teams. The Tech Talk also provides an interactive demo of how agentless and custom monitoring capabilities can not only support remote work strategies but also prioritize digital transformation initiatives.

Managed service providers (MSPs) have been around for more than 20 years, and my how things have changed since they grew out of the original application service provider (ASP) model. Until recently, MSPs have focused primarily on remote monitoring, security, network management and other routine IT tasks that CIOs would rather outsource for cheaper than they can run internally.

Customer-centricity is what many companies want to deliver, but what does that actually mean? For an enterprise software company like OpsRamp, it's about user experience and a comprehensive, feature-rich platform that delivers on their needs today and down the road. What new features or enhancements make our customers more productive and successful on the job, using our product? How can the platform work better for our customers and partners?