ITOps — what it means and what you should know

Most organizations and their customers now require instant access to various IT components — software applications, cloud resources, hardware updates, and so on. As a result, IT is an inevitable aspect of their operations, and ITOps is the cog that keeps all the IT components together. Organizations can set up an in-house IT team or hire managed service providers to enable ITOps.

What is ITOps

ITOps stands for IT operations and refers to the process of managing an organization’s IT operations. ITOps is responsible for the smooth running of an organization’s IT infrastructure and supports it to meet the business needs of internal and external users. In simple words, ITOps takes care of all the technology you need to run a business.

ITOps ensures that there are no interruptions to IT services. ITOps takes care of deployment, maintenance, configuration, and monitoring of all the physical and software components of a company’s IT environment.

ITOps processes

Infrastructure

Infrastructure management refers to the process of setting up, provisioning, maintaining, and updating all the software and hardware elements of the organization’s IT infrastructure. These elements include operating systems, professional tools, physical servers, laptops, printers, etc. ITOps also ensures storage requirements are made for on-prem or cloud processes.

Network

Network management refers to the process of managing network resources for internal and external IT communications. Network management also involves network performance monitoring. Network management at times requires the ITOps team to set up a physical network operations center that allows them to keep track of a network through continuous monitoring.

Security

Security management is a crucial function of ITOps. It starts with securing the hardware and software assets, which involves hardware replacement cycles and patch deployments to ensure software and hardware components are up to date and compliant. Security management also optimizes access control and ensures that security standards are met across the IT environment of the organization.

Problem-solving

Commonly known as incident management, this facet of ITOps takes preventive and reactive measures to ensure maximum IT uptime and efficiency. Incident management deals with disruptions or outages, traces the root cause of these issues and fixes them. It also takes preventive measures to minimize the possibility of disasters.

Importance of ITOps

ITOps is extremely crucial to business organizations. It maintains a reliable IT environment. Not only is ITOps responsible for all the IT assets used by the organization, but it is also tasked with ensuring that daily operations of the organization undergo without any disruptions.

ITOps best practices

Integrate IT automation

Organizations need to make sure their ITOps team is well-versed with automation. There are many benefits of ITOps automation. One of the primary benefits is data management. IT automation ensures that rapidly expanding real-time data is read and processed.

It also minimizes the margin of error by taking out the possibility of human error. In addition, IT automation improves visibility with automated monitoring, which also enables faster resolution.

Run hardware replacement cycles

IT hardware ages fairly quickly, and older machines pose efficiency and security risks. Moreover, hardware patches are not usually available for devices older than five years. Couple that with slow processors and other hardware components like hard drives; running old hardware weighs IT operations down and affects the overall productivity.

Organizations can run hardware replacement cycles every few years to ensure everything’s fresh. In addition, MSPs offer HaaS (Hardware as a Service) to let organizations lease their hardware elements that are updated by the service provider as and when necessary.

Improve communication and collaboration

Communication is a key factor of a modern-day workplace’s productivity. Therefore, organizations must double down on bridging the gap between IT operations personnel and other departments.

Implement performance indicators

Defining a set of key performance indicators allows the ITOps team to monitor, measure and evaluate progress. It becomes more relevant in an automated IT environment.

It’s advisable to develop a list of performance indicators based on the organization’s priorities which can be regularly measured to ensure optimum performance.

Evolve ITOps for a managed cloud infrastructure

In an age where organizations are quickly adopting distributed workforce, cloud infrastructure is more important than ever. On-premises IT environments have started to show their age and are now close to obsoletion.

Traditional ITOps must quickly accustom itself to cloud environments. Cloud environments with their boundless scalability and flexibility are the future. They are also automation-friendly.

Hire an MSP to ensure efficiency and improve ROI

Small and mid-size companies often have a hard time managing IT expenditures and IT equipment in general. Hiring a dedicated IT team comes at a cost, and there’s no guarantee of efficiency.

Managed service providers have a vast array of technology at their disposal. They can take care of your organization’s IT operations and help you come up with strategies that align with your business goals.MSPs provide guaranteed expertise and also offer flexible subscription options that allow you to plan your expenses.

Automated ITOps, powered by AIOps

AI and its data-driven decision-making help ITOps streamline its operations and empower it to deliver more. AIOps is becoming increasingly important because of the constantly expanding IT environments beyond the scope of human capability.

AIOps also implements big data and machine learning technology to come up with algorithms that allow it to analyze root causes, minimize false alerts, enable predictive analytics, and more.

AIOps also recycles knowledge and automates processes. It turns ITOps into a more modern and equipped workforce.

ITOps and MSPs: future implications

The future of ITOPs and MSPs is based on AI, automation, and integration. With an increasing demand for managed services, larger volumes of data accompanied by large-scale repetitive actions will make AI a necessity.

ITOps now has to ensure stability and security in dynamic and collaborative cloud-based environments. With the increased need for monitoring and agility in processes, AI integration is a no-brainer for ITOps.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, AI will be the top category driving infrastructure decisions. The possibilities are endless with AI, and MSPs must tap into this technology as soon as they can. Leveraging AI will allow MSPs to refine their ITOps and transform the way they deliver services.