What is IT Operations?
IT Ops maintains an organization’s IT infrastructure. ITOps makes ensuring that IT systems are operating economically and effectively, which lays the groundwork for expansion. Implementing new technologies, such software automation and cloud computing, is another aspect of ITOps that aims to decrease manual labour and expedite procedures. Businesses can make sure their IT systems are safe, dependable, and in line with industry standards and best practices by investing in ITOps.
Why is ITOps important?
You scarcely notice ITOps at work when everything is going well. Networks run smoothly, devices turn on, and users log in. ITOps is the centre of attention when things go wrong, and rightfully so! For a firm, downtime is quite expensive. Security lapses can have disastrous effects on both you and your clients. Employee productivity can be severely damaged by even minor occurrences. By investing in ITOps, you may prevent costly events and expedite their resolution when they do happen. Productivity, dependability, and efficiency are all increased by ITOps optimisations.
Increase reliability
Customers and staff demand all systems to be dependable and operational at all times in current “always-on” mentality. Nowadays, businesses record their “uptime,” with the majority of software companies achieving an annual uptime of 99.90%. That is still insufficient for some people. ITOps teams concentrate on quick issue response and resolution in order to get that final few percentage points. Teaching internal colleagues and customers how to effectively report IT concerns is the first step. Service desks with automated communication and escalation pathways are mostly used for this. When IT teams get early warnings through channels and tools optimised for quick response, customers benefit from quick response times.
Enhance productivity
ITOps increases business-wide and IT team productivity. IT affects almost every part of a company, and when IT systems are optimised, operations may go smoothly and uninterrupted. Starting with your IT staff’ productivity is the greatest approach to get this advantage. Using a service management platform, such as Jira Service Management, is the first step in investing in ITOps.
These tools provide you with the information you need to fix problems more quickly and painlessly. Consider an IT staff that has to deal with a 10-minute outage that impacts 100 employees. One thousand minutes of wasted productivity! That IT staff can restore 500 minutes of productivity if they can reduce their resolution time by half. Eight hours of productive time is that amount.
ITOps roles and responsibilities
Managing resources
An IT organization’s resource allocation is determined by its IT manager. To keep things operating smoothly, the majority of IT managers concentrate on people and budget management. Hardware and software tools often receive the majority of IT expenses. Two industry trends are often followed by IT people management.
Training all IT workers to be generalists capable of handling any request that crosses your desk is the first step. The second is to assemble a group of experts, each of whom specialises in a certain service that your team provides to the company. Either way, having a clear awareness of how resources are used and for what purposes is beneficial to the IT manager. To effectively manage IT resources, IT managers frequently employ uptime statistics and service desk data.
Incident management
When networks, hardware, or software malfunction, it’s called an incident. Incidents are stressful, high-intensity events, particularly when teams don’t have incident management procedures in place. ITOps procedures have the ability to turn incidents from chaotic, all-hands-on-deck situations into controlled actions with measurable outcomes. Establishing a culture of post-mortems and retrospectives on previous occurrences is the first step in optimising incident management. Teams use the lessons they’ve learnt to create detailed procedures that they decide to adhere to the following time. To properly handle all problems moving forward, teams then integrate the incident management workflow into their service management application.
Management of security
A focus on security may thrive in an environment where your IT personnel have well-documented procedures, capacity that is available, and effective tools. To lessen the impact of a security breach, the best teams document workarounds, expedite root cause analysis, and establish escalation channels. IT teams work together on external product security, such as protecting client data, and concentrate on the security of internal systems. Clear communication between IT teams and the development and product teams is crucial when working together.
Service desk support
IT departments provide a range of services to the company and manage them through a service desk. By generating a ticket from one of the services offered and providing the necessary information, customers self-serve at the service desk. With service level agreements (SLA) and explicit communication of the next steps, advanced teams set expectations for service. There is more to service desk assistance than only handling service enquiries. Your IT team’s structure and resource management are significantly impacted by the services you provide at your service desk, often referred to as your service catalogue.
Popular fields in ITOps
To carry out the services they provide, ITOps teams are searching for specialists. To succeed right away, approach an ITOps team that has expertise in a few critical areas.
Administration of the system
The administration of the IT systems in a data centre or business network is known as systems management.
Administration of networks
Knowledge of the programs, instruments, and procedures used to provision, run, maintain, administer, and secure network infrastructure is known as network management.
Administration of databases
Database administration is the process of modifying and controlling data to provide safe, effective access to information as required by the company.
Cloud computing
Businesses may transition from on-premises to cloud solutions by enabling cloud computing.
Management of data centres
Conversely, IT departments assist with the daily needs of running a data centre.
ITOps processes
From identity management to incident management, ITOps teams administer a broad range of services. Although the way each service is delivered will vary, almost all ITOps teams use the same basic procedures. Typically, teams begin by creating tickets in a service management application.
After being triaged, tickets are forwarded to colleagues who may begin addressing the problem. A kanban-style board with processes that monitor work as it moves closer to completion is used by many service desks. After reviewing potential solutions, teams will frequently release the work once it has been authorised. An effective method to fine-tune your own procedures is to concentrate on cutting down on time to resolution while preserving a high degree of client pleasure.
AIOps versus ITOps
Big data, AI algorithms, and machine learning are all combined in AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) to provide ITOps with actionable, real-time insights that support ongoing operational improvement.
The following are the three main parts of an AIOps solution:
Information
Gather raw data from many streams in both virtual and nonvirtual contexts, then organise and normalise it before combining it for alerts.
Analysis
Use Artificial Intelligence and machine learning to find typical data topology and behavioural patterns, connect linkages, and spot anomalies for accurate, useful, real-time insights.
Automated
Collect high-fidelity data in context continuously without the need for scripting or manual configuration.
For analysis, ITOps uses dashboards and manual correlations. In contrast, AIOps leverages AI and machine learning to provide insights and analysis automatically. In order to anticipate and avert future issues, AIOps also offers contextual knowledge of anomalies and event correlation with regard to the IT infrastructure, systems, applications, or service, regardless of cloud deployment.
