Not long ago, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) were seen by many as ‘technologies of the future’ that most businesses wouldn’t need to consider adopting until at least 2030. The pandemic changed that. The need for social distancing has accelerated the use of AR and VR in the real world. That in turn, has led to the discovery of new and immediate ways these technologies can be used across industries, offering real potential for even those who were previously wary.

As COVID-19 restrictions ease in the UK, businesses up and down the country are taking part in a great experiment of our times: hybrid working. The pandemic has changed the way we work for good, with some companies like Facebook and Twitter having announced plans to embrace remote working permanently.

Before the pandemic, while many universities had the ability to record lectures and distribute them digitally, the technology wasn’t used to its full potential and, in most cases, students were actively discouraged from relying on online teaching. For obvious reasons, this has now all changed. Last year, when universities were forced online, they did so rapidly and with surprising ease. We saw the adoption of platforms like Microsoft Teams come into play quickly and the sector managed to pivot to almost entirely remote working, learning and teaching overnight.

Globally, business leaders are leaning into — and leveraging — data to accelerate growth and gain competitive advantage. As industry moves more deeply into an ‘age of insight,’ where innovation and customer growth are interlocked with data collection, protection, retrieval, and analysis, secure and comprehensive backup is essential.

Backup and recovery need a radical rethink because most of the legacy solutions commonly found in businesses today were designed over a decade ago. Back then, backup was a low-cost insurance policy for data. Companies used incumbent vendors and patched together solutions, trying to minimise costs by spreading data across different infrastructure and media.

Fast. Change. New. These describe the business mandate, purpose and imperatives for developers. When stable, reliable and secure describe the business mandate of Operations, it’s no wonder they’re said to be like oil and water, working in silos with hard barriers between their purposes and needs.

The reality is that DevOps teams are often complicated to manage. The teams work towards a common goal, but both have vastly different approaches, KPIs and requirements. Developers think that ops are slow and obstructive, the giant brakes stopping the fabulous 4x4 ride into app and solution development success. IT Ops, on the other hand, is the team up at 3am fixing the problems in the code that the developers threw over the wall the day before, the team that has to ensure the implementation is solid and stable. It’s easy to see why the two can clash.

Do you feel as though developers don’t understand IT Ops’ key mandate—to keep the IT environment stable, compliant, secure and always on? Do developers get that everything else comes after that? While this may stem from their need for speed, it is also true that developers face pressures and challenges of their own. Some of them can be solved with the help of Operations in ways that also help you deliver on your goals more reliably.

As an intelligent and capable software development strategy, DevOps is hard to beat. It pulls on the expertise of the developer to unpack the innovation and create the applications that are needed to drive business at scale, and it tugs on the capabilities and efficiencies of the operations teams to ensure that these innovations and applications are delivered on time, without issues and continuously. In essence, DevOps was designed to minimise the conflicts that traditionally arose between developers and operations when the two teams operated in silos. However, IT Ops still has its issues with Dev, and Dev still thinks that IT Ops can be slow and obstructive. So, what happened?

What keeps developers up at night?