Understanding IT Operations: The Wizard of Your Organization

IT operations, or IT ops, is to organizations what Snape was to Harry—brutal, thorough and protective. In this article, we’ll learn what IT ops is, what they are to development teams, why we need them and how to get the most out of them.

Let’s start by asking, “What are IT operations?” Simply put, IT operations manage and maintain your infrastructure, encompassing the hardware, software, network and services supporting your organization.

To get into the details, IT ops include a wide range of security, service, network and end system management activities, which begs the question…

What Does IT Ops Include?

IT ops is crucial to delivering IT services effectively and efficiently. As such, it’s responsible for continuously monitoring all aspects of the IT infrastructure. Here are some key responsibilities of IT ops and how they relate to all IT infrastructure components.

• Configure: A part of IT ops configures the desired state of the systems.
• Deploy: A crucial part of IT ops involves installing, updating and enabling components in an IT environment.
• Manage: Continuously monitoring the IT environment and coordinating resource management, performance, incidents and change management.
• Remediate: IT ops software flags system incidents and facilitates fixes when necessary.

PS: Did you know you can automate all the above operations?

You can use tools like Progress Chef, to configure infrastructure, deploy and manage applications, scan for misconfigurations and provide automated remediations.

Tools You Can Consider for Your IT Operations

In this section, we’re exploring the options we’ve when it comes to tools to integrate into your IT ops. We’ve divided IT ops into five buckets to make it more understandable:

1. IT Infrastructure Monitoring: Solutions that monitor IT infrastructure by providing visibility into the health and performance of infrastructure components like servers and applications. They scan all systems and generate reports that tell you what problems have occurred and where.
2. Network Monitoring and Management: These tools help monitor network devices and connections. They report downtimes, unusual traffic patterns and performance changes.
3. Configuration Management: These tools help automate configuring and maintaining IT infrastructure and help reduce human errors and keep the process continuous.
4. IT Service Management (ITSM): These tools help manage service requests, incidents and changes, providing a structured approach to delivering and supporting IT services.
5. Security and Compliance: These tools monitor the IT environment's security and maintain its components' security and compliance.

Now that we’re relatively clear on what IT ops does, let’s add something else to the mix – IT Services. “How are they different?” you ask.

The Difference Between IT Operations and IT Services

They might sound similar, but they are starkly different when it comes down to the groundwork. IT ops, as we’ve learned, focuses on managing and maintaining IT environment ecosystems. Whereas IT services encompass the practices and processes used to deliver all kinds of technology to end-users.

IT Ops Standards and Best Practices

As is with everything in this world, IT ops is governed by guidelines and best practices to help maintain IT infrastructure effectively.

• Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL): A well-known and widely adopted set of practices and frameworks for IT activities.
• ISO/IEC 20000: An international standard for IT service management.
• Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT): It’s a framework that helps implement, monitor and improve IT operations.

While the above are more institutional standards, the IT community has a plethora of best practices that were put to the test and emerged successful:

• DevOps: Encourages development and operations teams to come together to streamline and automate IT operations, is widely employed for effective IT ops. DevOps now includes security checks during the early phase, which is why it is also known as DevSecOps.
• AIOps: Using artificial intelligence to enhance and support IT operations.
• Automation: Automating routine tasks like software updates, backups and monitoring can help reduce human error and speed up tasks.
• Documentation: Maintain exhaustive documentation of all your IT ops – configurations, deployments and incidents.

Now that we understand what IT ops is and how we can best implement it, let’s go further and see how you can get the most from your IT Ops with the least amount of work.

And yes, the answer is Chef.

Improving Your Business and Automating IT Operations

Surprise, surprise, we’re ending this blog with a pitch for our product. But hear us out—you can transform your business by automating IT Ops with Chef. This doesn’t apply to automating software updates and configuring devices; I mean automating almost everything your IT Ops software does.

With Chef, you can automate policy implementation for security and compliance, automate updates to every end system in your organization and manage infrastructure and application delivery at scale, a scale you can define. Chef also helps with job orchestration, allowing administrators to precisely execute commands throughout the IT infrastructure. It doesn’t just stop there – you can extend your IT Ops value to suit disparate environments — from any cloud to any edge. You can also use Chef to scan your IT fleet for compliance and misconfigurations.

In short, Chef provides a methodology for configuring, deploying and managing your IT infrastructure more securely and competently. It allows you to define your configurations in a human-readable code format. This way, you can define your policies and functionality using pre-defined recipes that help you navigate easily.

If you would like to explore how organizations use Chef for their IT ops, we’re providing additional resources for you:

1. Rally Software Unifies Developers and IT Operations with Chef to Rapidly Deliver New Services
2. Bank Hapoalim - Automating Infrastructure in a Highly Secure Environment
3. Discount Tire Taps Chef to Accelerate Application Delivery
4. Greenway Health Shrinks Application Deployment Time from Weeks to Hours with Chef