IT operations management (ITOM) and IT operations analytics (ITOA) help an organization ensure consistency, reliability and quality of services. Latest IT trends affecting IT operations include cloud computing, machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and the Internet of Things (IoT). IT operations are mainly concerned with various procedures and services administered and monitored by an organization’s information technology (IT) department. They include administrative processes and support for hardware and software, catering to internal as well as external clients.
The main prerequisite of IT operations is that they should be capable of delivering effective services at a given desired quality and cost. In this regard, IT operations are generally considered distinct from IT applications. There has to be a means to determine the way an organization is supposed to manage software and hardware while including other forms of IT support, such as network administration, device management, mobile contracting and helpdesks.
IT operations, tasks and procedures typically are manual, monotonous and rigid to ensure that changes are controlled and recognized to prevent unplanned outages. Automation of IT tasks and processes becomes as critical as any environmental shift towards agile infrastructure where speed is considered everything. A scenario like this is particularly suitable for cloud environments where infrastructure is often virtual and scalable, with users demanding instant access and full control of deployed services.
The efficiency of cloud computing typically envisages that IT operations for a given organization should have as few administrators as possible. Many public cloud players have emerged to support various requirements “as-a-service,” from a simple virtual instance. “CloudOps” is an evolving term and trend that attempts to ensure that the benefits of cloud-based systems can be well-preserved without IT operations losing control. Cloud operation is the formalization of best practices and processes that allow cloud-based platforms, applications and locally residing data to function well for a long duration of time.
Importance of cloud operations and management
Cloud computing is gaining ever more importance as enterprises depend more on private and public clouds. Enterprise organizations are aggressively moving to cloud services to gain flexibility without the worry of infrastructure management. Besides, they are able to better accommodate future changes that can happen as new technologies occur or there is a need to scale to support growth. Therefore CloudOps, need to define the right operational procedures and practices around what clouds can do, rather than the traditional approaches to operations for the cloud.
Cloud operations and management can be understood through various characteristics like cloud infrastructure and capacity planning, business process management, performance monitoring, infrastructure monitoring and incident management. Cloud operations offer enormous flexibility and fantastic options compared to storage methods or traditional computing. The cloud requires less hardware than traditional computing structures which provide greater flexibility and a lower upfront cost. Proper capacity planning stops you from paying for resources that aren’t being used effectively and saves you from unnecessary costs. A cloud-based process management offers a wide array of business transformational capabilities internally as well as extends to shareholders, partners and customers.
With regular updates and continuous monitoring, consumer can achieve a reduction in time with the help of monitoring and provisioning of the servers managed by the software itself. With the help of regular monitoring, proactive and managed solutions are provided to evaluate and maximize the business goals.
Continuous infrastructure monitoring helps overcome service disruptions like performance bottleneck, application failures and system outages which are very difficult to identify in the n-tier modern application stack. Incident Management provides a concrete approach to address SLA incidents by covering aspects affecting to service runtime in cloud with the help of monitoring and analysis of events that may not cause SLA breaches.
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