What Is IT Operations? Understanding Its Role in Business Continuity

Introduction

In today’s interconnected business environment, IT Operations (ITOps) should no longer be viewed as a back-office function. It should rather be seen as the backbone that derives business continuity. IT Operations practitioners from diverse industry backgrounds serve the same purpose: to ensure that their organization’s digital infrastructure remains resilient, secure, and responsive. This article explores the core functions of IT Operations in an organization, emphasizing its strategic role in business continuity as well as how organizations can optimize this important discipline of Information Technology (IT) for long-term resilience.

Defining IT Operations

IT Operations can have many terms depending on the level of its maturity in an organization. Fundamentally, it refers to the set of processes and services that the organization uses to maintain and manage its IT infrastructure. It typically encompasses the following aspects:

•  System administration: This pertains to ensuring the proper functioning of an organization’s systems. System administration is wide-ranging and encompasses managing servers, databases, and endpoints
•  Network operations: The objective of network operations is to ensure the continuous connectivity, bandwidth, and uptime in an organization.
• Security management: This involves monitoring threats to organizational systems, uncovering existing vulnerabilities and attacks, patching vulnerabilities, and enforcing policies to ensure continued security
• Service desk and support: Major activities under service desk and support, including handling incidents, requests, and user support. This ensures incidents are resolved in an effective and timely manner
•  Monitoring and performance: Monitoring and performance is key in IT Operations as allows for the tracking system health and optimizing resources to keep peace with organizational operations.

Strategic Role in Business Continuity

Business continuity (BC) is the ability of an organization to maintain essential functions during and after a disruption. IT Operations plays a pivotal role in this by supporting the following:

• Infrastructure Resilience: Through IT Operations, the organization can deploy redundant systems and failover mechanisms that support the business continuity process. It can also implement  high-availability architectures while ensuring that cloud and hybrid environments are always fault-tolerant
• Disaster Recovery (DR) Planning: IT operations assists the organization with disaster recovery planning by backing up critical data and systems and defining Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO). This ensures that minimal data is lost during disasters. Data restoration workflows can also be automated, reducing the time required for recovery purposes. 
• Incident Response: Detecting and responding to outages, breaches, and performance degradation. Coordinating with cybersecurity teams for containment and remediation, communicating with stakeholders during crises
• Compliance and Risk Management: Aligning with standards such as ISO/IEC 27001, NIST, and GDPR. Conducting regular audits and vulnerability assessments, documenting and testing BC/DR plans

Core Capabilities of Modern IT Operations

To support business continuity, modern ITOps must evolve beyond traditional break-fix models. Key capabilities include:

• Automation: Modern ITOps now incorporate tools such as Ansible, Puppet, or Azure Automation to reduce manual errors. These tools provide for increased accuracy and responsiveness.
• Observability: It is also important for modern ITOps to leverage observability platforms such as Datadog, Splunk, or Prometheus. These platforms offer real-time insights that are crucial for quick and effective decision-making.
• Configuration Management: The ITOps environment should support functional and effective configuration processes. This helps to ensure consistency across environments using CMDBs as well as support change management processes within an organization.
• Cloud-native Operations: Modern ITOps should be capable of managing multi-cloud and hybrid workloads with agility. This is because most organizations are or have moved some or all of their operations into the cloud. Hence, it is imperative to support such environments as well.
• AI/ML Integration: AI has been very topical in the field of ITOps as business and IT leaders seek to harness its capabilities to support a variety of operations. Use cases that AI/ML can support include predicting failures and providing worst-case scenarios, as well as optimizing performance using AIOps

IT Operations Metrics That Matter

To measure the effectiveness of IT Operations in supporting business continuity, organizations should track a variety of aspects, as shown in the table below:

Table 1: Important IT Operations Metrics 

Best Practices for IT Leaders

The following are some of the best practices IT leaders should use in IT Operations for effective results when it comes to supporting business continuity; 

• Integrate IT Operations into BC planning: Integrating IT Operations leaders into the BC planning and related process is a key element in ensuring the success of the overall process. Ensure ITOps leaders are part of strategic continuity discussions. This way, they will be informed and able to plan and adjust accordingly. 
• Invest in redundancy and failover: Avoid single points of failure across infrastructure layers through redundancy and failover systems. This reduces the impact of a disaster and allows IT Operations to concentrate on the critical aspects necessary for continuity. 
• Automate routine tasks: It is preferable to free up human capital for strategic initiatives by automating routine tasks involved in IT Operations. In some cases, automation can lead to a reduction in labour costs and/or enhanced efficiencies across the board. 
• Conduct regular DR drills: It is necessary to regularly carry out DR to validate recovery procedures and identify gaps. The most recommended practice is to carry out a drill at least once a year.
• Align with business objectives: IT and business leaders must always ensure IT services directly support mission-critical functions. This is key for a number of reasons, chief among them being to ensure that IT Operations investments directly benefit the organization and support its strategic initiatives.

Conclusion

As discussed in this article, IT Operations is no longer just about keeping IT systems on and functioning. It now encompasses several aspects and is often tasked with business continuity processes. Therefore, the discipline is now about enabling resilience, agility, and trust within an organization. It is therefore crucial for business leaders and IT practitioners to invest in robust ITOps capabilities. This will enable the organization to navigate business disruptions while maintaining customer confidence and driving sustainable growth.