2020 Incident Commander – Sharmila S.

Sharmila S., Senior Manager of the Network Operations Center at LogMeIn

In the year since being named an Incident Commander, Sharmila S. — like many — was tasked with helping implement a work-from-home policy during the global pandemic. This, in fact, turned out to be one of her greatest successes over the past year. “It was a big win because it was set up internationally across continents,” she says, detailing that her company’s teams were able to quickly pick up on the updated processes and tools that were necessary to navigate work during Covid-19.

With the Incident Commander title under her belt, Sharmila has gained even more confidence when it comes to incident management. She has also helped implement more training around policies, processes, change management and incident management, including the rollout of a new learning portal. She is also leading the charge in helping LogMeIn make major changes to its root cause analysis processes for all major outages.

The company recently implemented BigPanda, and so far it has been a success. She says her team previously needed to monitor eight or nine different dashboards depending on the application, and a big win has been being able to integrate them all into a single view, making the team’s day-to-day work lives much easier.

As for the future of ITOps from the view of an Incident Commander? “An Incident Commander has the ability to connect the dots and get a holistic view of things,” Sharmila explains. “The experience and knowledge of an Incident Commander help them provide and identify major improvement areas. In the long run, this is extremely useful for product availability, revenue from users, and customer satisfaction.”

Have an ITOps Hero? Nominate your Incident Commander.