Engineering:Information technology operations

Information technology operations, or IT operations, are the set of all processes and services that are both provisioned by an IT staff to their internal or external clients and used by themselves, to run themselves as a business. The term refers to the application of operations management to a business's technology needs. The definition of IT operations differ throughout the IT industry, where vendors and individual organizations often create their own custom definitions of such processes and services for the purpose of marketing their own products. Operations work can include responding to tickets generated for maintenance work or customer issues. Teams can use event monitoring to detect incidents. Many operations teams rely on on-call responses to incidents during off-hours periods. IT operations teams also conduct software deployments and maintenance operations.

Definitions

Joe Hertvik defines IT Operations as being "responsible for the smooth functioning of the infrastructure and operational environments that support application deployment to internal and external customers, including the network infrastructure; server and device management; computer operations; IT infrastructure library (ITIL) management; and help desk services for an organization."

Gartner defines IT operations as "the people and management processes associated with IT service management to deliver the right set of services at the right quality and at competitive costs for customers."

IT operations is generally viewed as a separate department from software development. It can include "network administration, device management, mobile contracting and help desks of all kinds."

Ernest Mueller defines IT operations as "a blanket term for systems engineers, system administrators, operations staff, release engineers, DBAs, network engineers, security professionals, and various other subdisciplines and job titles."

Responsibilities

Systems administration

A system administrator, or sysadmin, is a person who is responsible for the upkeep, configuration, and reliable operation of computer systems. Database administrators (DBAs) are a type of sysadmin.

Network administration

A network administrator maintains infrastructure such as network switches and routers. They use technologies such as firewalls to prevent unauthorized network access.

Help desk

Many IT operations teams are responsible for running a help desk. Help desks provide general technical support for both hardware and software issues.

Related terms

DevOps

DevOps is a software development and delivery process that seeks to automate the processes of software integration, testing, deployment, and infrastructure changes by establishing a culture and environment where building, testing, and releasing software can happen rapidly, frequently, and more reliably.

DevOps focuses on improving automation and measurement of system metrics. DevOps is generally not considered a separate job role, but is applied by all the developers at a company.

See also

• Configuration management database
• IT asset management
• IT service management
• IT governance

External links

• ITOperationsAnalytics.net: What is IT Operations