Without question, businesses in the present day are more reliant on technology than they ever have been, and this has resulted in IT teams becoming much more useful than they ever were. While IT has always been a crucial part of any business, it has recently grown far more specialized.
There are so many terms and abbreviations that an outsider can easily get lost figuring out what each of them is responsible for. For example, what is IT operations management (ITOM) and what can it do for a business? In today’s guide, we’re going to cover all of the basics of what an ITOM team does.
What is IT Operations Management (ITOM)
To put it simply, IT operations management is concerned with making sure that all of the technology used by a particular organization or company is running smoothly. You may be thinking that this sounds just like what you’d expect from a traditional IT team, but there are a few key differences.
For example, if you work in ITOM, you’ll likely be tasked with ensuring that on-site infrastructure and data centers are operating properly. This is the equipment that is responsible for maintaining the cloud environment that is so crucial to any business with a significant amount of data.There are also additional ways to do this, like hiring a DataOps engineer, or finding a different approach altogether.
You’ll also have to manage security, both internal and external for your business’s operations. Other responsibilities include cost control for a business’s virtual environment and the management of current assets to ensure that they don’t reach maximum capacity and derail operations.
What Does IT Operations Management Do?
There are many things that ITOM workers are tasked with, but some of their most crucial responsibilities include the management of several sectors of the business, as the name would suggest. For example, they manage network infrastructure, servers and on-site devices, and the help desk along with computer ops.
Managing Network Infrastructure
One of the most essential things that ITOM is tasked with is ensuring that all network infrastructure is operating smoothly. This ensures that a company’s information is all easy to access and isn’t subject to any attacks that could potentially affect the infrastructure components.
Along with security, IT operations management entails the physical maintenance of things like servers and machines that are used to maintain a business’s infrastructure. Along with maintaining things like servers, ITOM is also expected to set them up in the first place, including expanding systems whenever required.
Managing Servers and Devices
You’ll also be tasked with ensuring that the local hardware used by a business functions as it should. Endpoints like servers and computers on the premises are often vulnerable to attacks or simple malfunctions, so ITOM will monitor them and see if any event that happens can be properly managed.
Managing the Help Desk and Computer Operations
Another thing that you’ll have to deal with when working in the ITOM field is the ability to manage help desks. The help desk is often tasked with responding to incidents and events. They are also in charge of managing operational resources and the local IoT that is being used by a business.
However, it isn’t all about responding to incidents and accidents, as you’ll also have to come up with schedules to ensure that all employees properly back up their data. This part of the ITOM field mainly focuses on disaster recovery and what a business will do if it’s suffering from outages or other complex technical problems.
Challenges Faced by ITOM Teams
Common challenges faced by teams in IT operations management include adapting to the ever-growing size of a business. Consider that for every year a business operates (assuming it grows), it will be dealing with three times more information, year by year.
Along with ensuring that a business is secure and operating viably and safely, you’ll also be tasked with cost control in the field of IT. This is part of the “management” side of IT operations management, so you’ll be responsible for figuring out how you can maximize the effectiveness of the technical side of a business without putting it in the red.
You’ll have to consider the visibility of the IT architecture that you’re working with if you want to be a successful ITOM manager. What this means is that you’ll have to oversee the transfer of company information from individual systems to the cloud, where it can more easily be accessed and managed for networking applications.
Another thing that you can do to improve the visibility of company systems is to unify the sources of the information that you’re dealing with. At the very least, you’ll want to use programs that improve visibility by communicating with each other through cloud infrastructure.
