Ask the Expert: Insights from Paula Thrasher, Senior Director of Infrastructure and Platform, PagerDuty

Paul Thrasher, Senior Director of Infrastructure and Platform at PagerDuty, discusses the challenges and opportunities for tech leaders in an increasingly complex digital landscape, including managing IT system complexity and maintaining operational resilience. Thrasher emphasizes the importance of balancing efficiency with resilience, as outages can erode trust and impact revenue, urging tech executives to evaluate the cost of downtime comprehensively. He advocates for breaking down silos between engineering and operations teams to enhance collaboration and incident management, emphasizing the role of automation in reducing repetitive tasks and allowing teams to address higher-value problems. Thrasher suggests a careful, incremental approach to automation, starting with well-defined tasks, and highlights the rising importance of AI and the integration of digital operations with security. He contends that effective use of AI and strong security integration are crucial for maintaining competitive advantage and system resilience.