Accelerating IT Operations – A Survey of Common Approaches and Best Practices
December 16, 2024
Executive Summary
With the evolution of IT Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) in the era of cloud computing, DevOps, and digital transformation, traditional setups have transitioned to hybrid, cloud-native, and automated environments. The modern I&O landscape emphasizes agility, resilience, and user experience, playing a pivotal role in driving business success in the digital age. Enterprises are reshaping their IT infrastructure operations by integrating top capabilities from current best practices, fostering innovation and adaptability.
Introduction
In our last series, ‘Land and Strand’, we examined the phenomenon of enterprises moving applications to cloud environments without modernizing the underlying application architecture. This created challenges and bottlenecks due to not fully taking advantage of the benefits of architecture-level capabilities of cloud-native design.
(See “From Lift & Shift to Land & Strand” )
In this new blog series, we move beyond the application layer to the on-going, optimal Run activities, or Day 2 IT Operation. Once you have a well architected and optimally running workload, how do you keep it that way? We will examine several strategic approaches that are being used by large, global companies to address doing IT Operations better.
What are IT Operations (ITOps)
IT Operations (ITOps) refers to the processes, roles, and tools involved in managing and maintaining IT infrastructure. Its primary goal is to ensure the continuous delivery of IT services, supporting both business users and customers. Core aspects of ITOps include:
- Monitoring and Maintenance:
- Tracking system health, performance, and security to ensure uptime and reliability.
- Incident Management:
- Responding to and resolving system outages, security incidents, or performance issues.
- Capacity Planning:
- Ensuring the infrastructure can handle current and future demand, scaling as needed.
- Backup and Disaster Recovery:
- Safeguarding data and services through redundancy, backups, and recovery plans to mitigate downtime or loss.
- Security Management:
- Protecting systems from cyber threats, ensuring compliance with regulations, and implementing access controls.
- Configuration Management:
- Tracking and maintaining software and hardware configurations to ensure consistency.
- Change Management:
- Managing updates, patches, and system upgrades to minimize disruptions.
- Service Delivery:
- Supporting business applications, ensuring they meet agreed service levels (SLAs).
IT Operations (ITOps) is essential because it forms the foundation for an organization’s ability to deliver reliable, secure, and scalable IT infrastructure services. It ensures that technology systems are functional, optimized, and aligned with business goals, enabling organizations to remain competitive, efficient, and resilient.
While it may seem that the industry has long since perfected the operation, management and governance of IT infrastructure, the ever-dynamic nature of IT infrastructure means that managing same must also be dynamic. In fact, as mentioned earlier, the innovation and speed at which IT infrastructure is evolving is unprecedented. Whether it be:
- Data concerns – generation, management and operation, or
- Transport – network, 5G, IoT
- Processing – data center, private/public cloud, edge computing … even quantum
- Applications – traditional, SaaS, Cloud-native, Containerized
- Insights, Intelligence – AI, GenAI, ML, LLMs, GPTs
- Experiences – Self-Service, Managed, Co-Managed
All are combining to make supporting infrastructure and the definition of Hybrid more complex, more diversified and more complicated to manage and optimize.
Let us look at how approaches are emerging and evolving at large organizations to address the modern IT dynamics.
IT Operations (ITOps) Approaches
Today, there are five commonly used approaches to Infrastructure Operations management alongside Infrastructure Platform Engineering (IPE):
Approaches to Infrastructure Operations Management:
- Traditional IT Operations
- Centralized teams manually manage physical and virtual infrastructure.
- Focuses on stability and reliability with minimal changes.
- Typically aligned to ITIL standards
- DevOps
- Collaboration between development and operations teams to automate and streamline delivery pipelines.
- Emphasizes CI/CD, monitoring, and rapid iterations.
- Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
- Combines software engineering and operations to enhance reliability and scalability.
- Focuses on metrics-driven approaches like Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
- Cloud-Native Operations
- Leverages managed cloud services and containerized platforms like Kubernetes.
- Emphasizes elasticity, automation, and API-driven workflows.
- Infrastructure Platform Engineering (IPE)
- Provides a centralized, developer-friendly platform to abstract infrastructure complexities.
- Offers self-service capabilities and infrastructure-as-code automation.
Traditional IT Operations is stable but lacks agility and scalability, making it ideal only for legacy systems.
DevOps is versatile and focuses on delivery speed but requires strong cultural shifts and investments in tooling.
SRE is ideal for services requiring high reliability but can be complex and resource-intensive to implement.
Cloud-Native Operations is highly automated and scalable but dependent on the chosen cloud provider, limiting control over some customizations.
Infrastructure Platform Engineering (IPE) strikes a balance between standardization and developer autonomy, making it suitable for large-scale or modern cloud-native environments.
Tradeoffs Between IPE and Alternatives:
| Feature/Criteria | Infrastructure Platform Engineering (IPE) | Traditional IT Operations | DevOps | Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) | Cloud-Native Operations |
| Focus | Platform-driven self-service infrastructure | Stability, manual management | Automation, collaboration, and speed | Reliability and scalability | Cloud-native technologies and automation |
| Automation | High (via IaC, CI/CD, and APIs) | Low | High | Moderate to high | High |
| Developer Experience | Excellent, with self-service capabilities | Poor (relies on IT requests) | Moderate (devs involved in infra) | Moderate to low | Good |
| Scalability | Highly scalable (designed for growth) | Limited | Scalable (requires DevOps culture) | Highly scalable | Highly scalable |
| Customization | Moderate (standardized platforms) | High (custom setups possible) | High (tailored pipelines) | Moderate | Moderate |
| Security and Compliance | Integrated, standardized | Manual, inconsistent | Integrated into workflows | High, with a focus on reliability | Cloud provider-dependent |
| Operational Complexity | Abstracted for end-users | High (manual effort required) | High (requires cultural shift) | High (requires specialized SRE expertise) | Moderate (cloud platform-specific tools) |
| Learning Curve | Moderate (for platform engineers) | Low (familiar but limited) | High (requires DevOps practices) | High (requires engineering background) | Moderate |
| Cost | Optimized through centralized management | High (due to inefficiency) | Moderate to high (tooling and processes) | High (engineering expertise is expensive) | Moderate (cloud usage costs) |
| Adaptability | Flexible, supports hybrid and multi-cloud setups | Rigid, slow to adapt | Flexible, but requires DevOps alignment | High (but specialized for reliability goals) | Flexible |
| Use Cases | Large teams, cloud-native organizations, high growth | Legacy systems | Agile teams focusing on rapid delivery | High availability services | Cloud-first startups and modern enterprises |
Conclusion
In today’s digital-first world, IT Operations is not just about keeping the lights on; it’s a strategic enabler for innovation, efficiency, and resilience. By ensuring that technology systems run smoothly and securely, IT Operations directly supports organizational success, adaptability, and growth.
Ultimately, choosing the right approach depends on your organization’s maturity, goals, and operational challenges.
Today, most enterprise employ an aggregated, balanced approach for hybrid environments that combines cloud-native practices with traditional infrastructure management to ensure seamless integration, scalability, and reliability. This involves leveraging Infrastructure as Code (IaC) for automation and consistency, adopting DevOps principles for collaboration and rapid deployments, and implementing observability tools for monitoring across on-premises and cloud systems. A focus on security and compliance ensures that data and applications are protected regardless of location, while centralized management platforms enable unified visibility and control. Hybrid IT Operations should be flexible, adaptable, and aligned with the organization’s unique business needs.
Next in this series, we will dive deeper into each approach, providing a more in-depth technical description, best practices of each approach, the participation of specific roles and examples of how enterprises are combining the approaches to their advantage or limitation
Other Postings in this Series
- Part 1: Life In The Fast-lane – Introduction
- Part 2: Life In The Fast-lane – Traditional IT Operations (coming)
- Part 3: Life In The Fast-lane – DevOps (coming)
- Part 4: Life In The Fast-lane – Site Reliability Engineering (coming)
- Part 5: Life In The Fast-lane – Cloud-Native Operations (coming)
- Part 6: Life In The Fast-lane – Infrastructure Platform Engineering (coming)
About the Author
Robert is seasoned high-tech software executive with more than 30 years of proven industry experience, both in entrepreneurial and enterprise corporate settings. With proven track record of bringing to market dozens of enterprise-class commercial platforms and products, Robert has built and led high-velocity product and strategy teams of product managers, developers, sales teams, marketing teams and delivery units.
His mission is to help enterprises achieve sustainable competitive growth through innovation, agility, and customer-centric value.
@Robert – www.linkedin/in/ericksonrw
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