Today, we are seeing a trend of rapid technological change both within the company and in customer requirements. To remain competitive in the service market, we need to make constant operational changes in the IT infrastructure.

Companies are turning to IT Operations Management to get things right in this difficult situation, which, like a snowball, can have consequences for the entire business.

Change in corporate IT

The use of modern technologies determines the company’s ability to respond to market changes, customer requests and the implementation of its own business plan. IT-director is responsible both for monitoring and application of modern trends, and for providing this information to the company’s management to implement the business strategy.

Not only the IT department, but also other departments of the company take an active part in its construction, as they are direct consumers of new technologies (computers, cloud services, security tools and others).

Changes in technologies require regular and large-scale changes in the IT infrastructure, it is becoming more complex and uncontrollable. In order to keep up with the growth of a company, it must constantly evolve.

The role of IT and the IT infrastructure is as follows:

• Helping the company fulfill its business plan.
• Maximize the value of IT infrastructure.
• Identify new technology trends in advance and make a smooth transition to them.
• Eliminate or manage the risks associated with IT infrastructure expansion.

In order to perform these functions, the IT infrastructure must address several complex issues within the company’s ecosystem.

What internal challenges do companies face?

Budget. The task of the IT department is to use less investment and deliver more services, so you can use your budget as efficiently as possible.

Distributed structure of the company. Large companies have geographically dispersed offices in different time zones. Remote work of employees or entire departments is also gaining popularity – it also adds to the difficulties in servicing.

According to the Forrester Report, in 2016, 43% of the U.S. workforce (63 million people) worked remotely. Intuit’s research estimates the number of freelancers at 60 million by 2020. The IT infrastructure must support the operation of remote offices, as well as the ability of employees to work remotely.

BYOD (personal devices for work). According to Gartner’s report “Bring your own device: The facts and the future”, by 2017, 50% of employers will require their employees to use their own equipment for work.

And Juniper Research estimates that by 2018, more than 1 billion devices will be used in BYOD mode. The widespread use of multifunctional tablets has further blurred the boundaries of everyday computing between traditional PCs and mobile devices.

The variety of gadgets in use creates additional challenges for service integration, software compatibility, licensing, security, and non-standard infrastructure.

What external challenges do companies face?

Technology development. There are a number of trends in technology development that affect the corporate IT infrastructure. Cloud computing is not just a trend, but one of the main strategies for IT development.

There are several ways to use the cloud: public cloud, private cloud or hybrid. They all have special requirements for computing systems, data warehousing and network infrastructure, as well as software platform, monitoring and reporting systems.

These technologies are evolving rapidly, occupying an increasingly large part of the IT infrastructure and driving IT development, and thus placing high demands on performance and efficiency.

Security. In June 2015, the UK’s Department of Business, Innovation and Skills released its Information Security Breaches Survey report, which found that 90 percent of large and 74 percent of small organizations had corporate data leaks in 2014.

IT infrastructure needs to evolve to ensure the security and integrity of data when stored and processed on enterprise computing systems, as well as when transmitted over various communication channels.

Standards. Formulating standards and complying with them requires a great deal of work. The main reasons are complex and dynamically changing environments, increasing complexity of information systems, distributed geography of departments and others.

Clear management standards need to be developed and followed, and they need to be regularly reported to senior management to ensure transparency. IT infrastructure must comply with all requirements of specifications and standards, as well as collect and analyze data and generate reports.

Answers to questions raised

To cope with the task of centralizing management and streamlining the resulting chaos, the company’s IT department turns to IT Operations Management (ITOM). ITOM focuses on managing the IT infrastructure that forms the basis for service delivery.

Within a typical company, it can include network infrastructure, Internet connectivity, computing, storage, software and even IT services provided by the company.

In order to make efficient use of IT investments and to react quickly to changes, companies turn to ITOM software solution providers.

ITOM software helps to automate processes related to infrastructure provision, capacity allocation, performance management and ongoing maintenance of all IT infrastructure elements.

How ITOM helps the IT department

The main task of ITOM implementation is to achieve visibility and control over various elements of the company’s IT infrastructure for easy and flexible management.

This allows us to provide services according to SLA, to use IT infrastructure in the most efficient way, to respond flexibly to external and internal needs and to provide better service and support.

ITOM usage scenarios

Automation. This is a key advantage. ITOM automates various elements of the IT infrastructure, including IT service management (through Service Desk optimization), data center management (including virtualized elements) and LAN management. Automating these processes makes reacting to changes and incidents faster and more efficient.

Monitoring. ITOM allows you to collect information from multiple sources, including all the major elements of the IT infrastructure. These data can be analyzed and then reported on in the form of IT transaction reports on parameters such as load, performance and user actions.

This makes it easy to identify problems early, diagnose them and resolve them quickly. ITOM also provides visibility to users and the problems they face.

Efficient management. ITOM provides more efficient management of the IT infrastructure by using a common management platform for different information systems of the company.

ITOM interacts with these systems at the API level and provides full communication between them. ITOM also allows you to control the allocation of resources, such as software licenses and cloud services, based on workload analysis.

Proactive forecasting. Technology is changing very quickly, IT management must be flexible to respond to these changes. The use of ITOM allows you to proactively anticipate these changes and adjust your IT infrastructure in advance for easy and flexible management.

This allows us to provide services according to SLA, to use IT infrastructure in the most efficient way, to respond flexibly to external and internal needs and to provide better service and support.