Accelerating IT Operations – A Survey of Common Approaches and Best Practices – Part 2
Executive Summary
Traditional IT operations form the backbone of organizational technology infrastructure, emphasizing stability, reliability, and control. This approach is characterized by structured, hierarchical processes and manual oversight, ensuring predictable outcomes for mission-critical systems. Traditional IT operations focus on key pillars such as system administration, hardware management, network operations, and incident response, often adhering to established frameworks like ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library).
And while traditional IT operations have been integral to supporting legacy systems and mission-critical applications, the shift towards digital transformation and cloud-native architectures is challenging their long-term viability. Organizations are increasingly adopting hybrid approaches, blending traditional IT practices with modern methodologies to retain stability while improving agility and scalability. It is critical to understand that traditional IT operations will continue to play in hybrid IT operating models.
Introduction
As we covered in the first article, there are five common approaches to managing IT operations:
- Traditional IT Operations
- DevOps
- Site Reliability Engineering
- Cloud-Native Operations (CloudOps)
- Infrastructure Platform Engineering
In this article, we continue our exploration the current approaches to managing IT operations by digging more deeply into the first common approach to managing ITOps – Traditional IT Operations.
Traditional IT Operations
Traditional IT Operations refers to the established practices and processes used to manage and maintain an organization’s IT infrastructure and systems. These operations typically focus on ensuring system availability, reliability, and performance through manual workflows and established protocols.
Core Functions
Traditional IT operations encompass a wide range of essential functions designed to ensure the smooth and efficient delivery of technology services within an organization. These core functions include:
- infrastructure management, which involves maintaining and monitoring servers, networks, and data centers to ensure optimal performance and reliability.
- System administration is another critical function, focusing on configuring, updating, and managing software and hardware systems. IT operations also handle
- Incident management by responding to and resolving technical issues promptly to minimize disruptions.
- IT service management ensures that services align with organizational needs, often guided by frameworks like ITIL.
- Security management, which safeguards systems and data from cyber threats
- Performance monitoring, which tracks and improves system efficiency, system performance and health using traditional monitoring tools.
- Maintenance: Applying updates, patches, and optimizations to prevent problems.
- Provisioning: Setting up new systems or scaling resources as needed, often manually.
Together, these functions form the backbone of IT, enabling businesses to operate securely and effectively while adapting to evolving technological demands.
Case Study: Optimizing Traditional ITOps to Drive Value in a Leading Banking Enterprise
Introduction
A major global banking enterprise, referred to as Global Bank, relied heavily on traditional IT Operations (ITOps) to manage its infrastructure, applications, and service delivery. Like many organizations, Global Bank faced challenges related to operational inefficiencies, service outages, and increasing IT complexity. This case study outlines how Global Bank optimized its traditional ITOps to deliver significant value and achieve meaningful business outcomes.
Background
Global Bank is a multinational financial services provider operating in over 30 countries, serving millions of customers worldwide. Its IT infrastructure supported core services such as digital banking, payment processing, credit operations, and regulatory compliance. The organization had traditionally followed a manual, reactive ITOps model, where operations teams focused on:
- Incident management to resolve issues as they occurred,
- Periodic maintenance with routine checks and manual reporting,
- Static capacity planning that struggled to scale with growing customer demand.
Over time, Global Bank experienced challenges that hindered its ability to meet operational and customer expectations:
- High MTTR (Mean Time to Repair): Resolving outages or issues took too long, impacting customer satisfaction.
- Operational Silos: Lack of collaboration across IT teams led to delays and fragmented workflows.
- Legacy Systems: Outdated tools and manual monitoring processes resulted in limited visibility into performance.
- Rising Costs: IT inefficiencies led to ballooning operational expenses.
- Regulatory Compliance Risks: Manual reporting processes slowed down audits and exposed Global Bank to compliance issues.
Global Bank realized that to remain competitive in a fast-evolving market, it needed to optimize its traditional ITOps to achieve faster delivery, greater visibility, and improved customer experience.
The Strategy: Modernizing Traditional ITOps
Global Bank took a strategic approach to optimize its traditional ITOps framework by combining process optimization, automation, and improved collaboration. This included the following key steps:
- Enhanced Monitoring and Incident Management
- Deployed centralized monitoring tools to gain real-time visibility into critical systems.
- Implemented automated alerting mechanisms to detect anomalies and respond quickly.
- Improved Incident Management Processes by standardizing escalation and resolution workflows.
- Automation of Repetitive Tasks
- Leveraged IT automation tools to replace manual, repetitive tasks, such as system health checks, patching, and log analysis.
- Created self-healing scripts to auto-resolve minor issues without human intervention.
- Collaboration and Knowledge Management
- Established cross-functional incident response teams to break down silos and improve communication.
- Implemented a knowledge management system to capture incident resolutions for future use.
- Capacity Planning and Optimization
- Transitioned to a data-driven approach to predict capacity requirements.
- Analyzed historical performance data to optimize infrastructure utilization and reduce costs.
- Compliance and Reporting Efficiency
- Streamlined compliance reporting with automated tools that generate audit-ready reports in real-time.
- Improved data accuracy and transparency across IT systems.
Key Outcomes
By optimizing its traditional ITOps, Global Bank delivered significant improvements in operational efficiency and business outcomes:
- Improved Service Availability
- Reduced unplanned downtime by 45% through proactive monitoring and incident management.
- Achieved 99.9% uptime for mission-critical applications.
- Faster Issue Resolution
- Lowered Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) by 40% through automation and better escalation processes.
- Cost Optimization
- Reduced operational costs by 20% through automated workflows and optimized resource utilization.
- Saved over $5 million annually by identifying underutilized assets and reallocating resources effectively.
- Enhanced Regulatory Compliance
- Reduced compliance reporting times from weeks to hours with automated, real-time reporting.
- Improved accuracy and auditability of IT processes.
- Boosted Customer Experience
- Achieved faster service recovery during outages, minimizing disruptions for customers.
- Increased customer satisfaction scores by 15% due to higher reliability of banking services.
By optimizing its traditional ITOps, Global Bank transformed its IT operations into a more streamlined, efficient, and proactive model. While remaining on a traditional ITOps foundation, the strategic improvements in monitoring, automation, collaboration, and capacity planning enabled Global Bank to:
- Improve service availability,
- Enhance cost efficiency,
- Ensure compliance with regulatory requirements, and
- Deliver a superior customer experience.
This transformation allowed Global Bank to stay competitive in the banking industry while preparing its IT operations for future modernization initiatives, such as adopting AIOps and cloud-based infrastructure. Global Bank’s journey demonstrates the value of incremental improvements to traditional ITOps in driving measurable and meaningful business outcomes.
So Why Change
Most enterprises today employ some form of traditional IT operations as its model for managing, operating and governing their core IT assets. However, this is rapidly changing – in part due to some of the limitations that Traditional IT Operations present:
- Slow Adaptation: Manual processes and siloed teams hinder the speed of change and deployment.
- Resource Intensive: High dependence on human effort for repetitive tasks leads to inefficiencies.
- Limited Scalability: Traditional operations struggle to meet the demands of rapidly growing or complex systems.
- Reactive Nature: Focused on troubleshooting rather than preventing issues, leading to frequent downtime.
When Traditional ITOps is Beneficial in a Hybrid IT Situation
Many organizations often stick with traditional IT operations because it aligns with their priorities—stability, risk mitigation, and familiarity. For industries or systems where change could lead to disruption or non-compliance, the conservative nature of traditional IT remains appealing. However, as digital transformation accelerates, many organizations are being compelled to adapt or modernize to remain competitive.
Modernization, however, does not have to mean one or the other. Organization can take a pragmatic approach to managing IT in a hybrid manner.
In hybrid IT environments, where on-premises infrastructure coexists with cloud-based solutions, traditional ITOps remains beneficial in several scenarios:
- Managing Legacy Systems: Organizations with critical legacy systems that cannot be moved to the cloud still require traditional ITOps for maintenance, monitoring, and performance optimization.
- Ensuring Stability for Core Workloads: Traditional ITOps excels in managing stable, predictable workloads that are critical to the business, such as financial transaction systems in banking.
- Regulatory and Compliance Requirements: Some industries, like banking, have strict regulatory mandates that require data to remain on-premises. Traditional ITOps ensures these systems comply with regulations while maintaining high availability.
- Security for Sensitive Data: For highly sensitive data that cannot be migrated to the cloud, traditional ITOps provides robust on-premises security, monitoring, and incident management.
- Cost Control: Traditional ITOps can be more cost-effective for workloads with low variability, avoiding the need for complex cloud management and unpredictable costs.
- Seamless Integration with Cloud Operations: Traditional ITOps plays a critical role in hybrid environments by integrating with cloud-based tools, ensuring end-to-end visibility and management across both on-premises and cloud systems.
Final Thoughts
At the end of the day, traditional ITOps continues to provide value in hybrid IT environments by maintaining stability, meeting compliance needs, and ensuring the performance of critical on-premises systems, while also acting as a bridge to future digital transformation initiatives.
Traditional IT operations play a vital role in ensuring the stability, security, and efficiency of an organization’s technology infrastructure, enabling seamless business operations and growth. By managing systems, networks, and data, IT operations provide the foundation for reliable service delivery, rapid incident resolution, and robust cybersecurity. When combined with other IT Operations approaches or Hybrid IT Operations, which integrate traditional on-premises systems with cloud-based solutions, IT operations become even more valuable. This hybrid approach allows organizations to leverage the flexibility, scalability, and cost-efficiency of the cloud while maintaining control over critical systems.
At the end of the day, traditional ITOps continues to provide value in hybrid IT environments by maintaining stability, meeting compliance needs, and ensuring the performance of critical on-premises systems, while also acting as a bridge to future digital transformation initiatives.
In the next posting, we will continue the drive towards understanding Modern ITOps with a stopover at DevOps.
Get ready for Life in the Fastlane! Modern ITOps. Done Better.
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Other Postings in this Series
- Part 1: Life In The Fast-lane – Introduction
- Part 2: Life In The Fast-lane – Traditional IT Operations
- Part 3: Life In The Fast-lane – DevOps
- Part 4: Life In The Fast-lane – Site Reliability Engineering
- Part 5: Life In The Fast-lane – Cloud-Native Operations
- Part 6: Life In The Fast-lane – Infrastructure Platform Engineering
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.
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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