A comprehensive IT operations management (ITOM) strategy can do wonders for overall business performance against objectives. ITOM can be broadly regarded as the management of infrastructure, technology, and services by your IT department. By ensuring the availability, ongoing maintenance, and effective deployment of these services, you can maintain high IT service delivery standards in the long term.
During a digital transformation, it can be challenging to manage your new infrastructure and software. There are many aspects of ITOM that are overlooked, reducing visibility into architectural shortcomings, which then hinders business growth. Let us explore some commonly overlooked aspects of ITOM.
ITOM Shortcomings
IT needs to be at the heart of your overall business strategy. With end-user expectations rising and regulations getting more stringent, proper management of your systems is vital in our technology-driven world.
Departmental Segregation
Are your various departments able to interface effectively with each other? If you answered no, your network might be segregated into IT siloes.
These IT siloes relate to the infrastructure and software used by individual teams across your business. They are typically borne from differing technological needs between departments. As we move to the cloud, this lack of unification can hinder interdepartmental communication, reducing collaboration, and impeding strategic innovation.
There are many benefits to a unified, centralized IT infrastructure:
Standardizing your internal service delivery allows for easy importing and exporting of information, streamlining communication across your business. By prioritizing this as part of your ITOM strategy, you can increase collaboration across your company.
With everyone accessing your network through the same entry point, you also improve security, and thus compliance against data protection regulations. You can use identity access management (IAM) and two-factor authentication (2FA) in your ITOM strategy to bolster your network security.
Disaster Recovery
Has the process of backing up your data become more difficult over time? Segregation of IT services complicates the process of backing up your data, especially with hybrid cloud deployments. This problem is often unavoidable, as departments will need specific software to accomplish their daily tasks.
By integrating disaster recovery into your ITOM strategy, you can streamline backup operations across your network. Many cloud-native ITOM tools allow you to run a single backup for your entire IT infrastructure by integrating applications and orchestrating your software backups from a single unified dashboard. This comes with the added benefit of reducing administrative overhead and the likelihood of human error.
Ineffective Event Management
Does your IT department have specific monitoring tools for each software package on your network? The separation of these network health reports can complicate problem remediation, as you are unable to find correlations between errors across your network.
With cloud-native ITOM tools, you can unify these reports within a single management console. Thanks to machine learning and artificial intelligence, you can uncover hidden correlations between troublesome network errors. Now, you can fix the root cause of the problem, rather than fighting recurrent fires borne from improper software configuration. This has the long-term benefit of reducing low-level service requests, allowing you to focus on more business-critical issues.
Limited Architectural Visibility
Are you only made aware of service delivery issues after your IT department's phone lines are flooded with calls? This shows a lack of network visibility, which promotes a more retroactive approach to ITOM.
By utilizing cloud-native ITOM tools, you can achieve greater visibility into your overall network status. User-facing services may be suffering due to a lack of network resource availability, lowering the perceived quality of your services to end-users. By integrating your various services into a unified monitoring dashboard, you can proactively scale your systems in the cloud, avoiding service slowdowns.
Streamline Your IT Operations Management with Trianz
Trianz is a leading IT operations management consulting firm, with decades of experience helping our clients to modernize their IT operations management strategies. Through careful planning and assessment, we can help you develop a tailored, cloud-native ITOM strategy that maximizes your business potential.
