ITOM as Key to DevOps Acceleration

In an increasingly fast-paced and complex business world, the continuously disruptive digital channels and mobile devices evolution and competition mean organizations must adapt to survive. For example, technology leaders must wrap their heads around DevOps acceleration to gain an advantage and expand their software market opportunities. 

To this end, 83 percent of IT decision-makers said their companies are implementing DevOps practices to achieve higher business value and agility, according to the State of DevOps 2021 Report.  

Also, the DevOps Market size surpassed $7 billion and is estimated to grow by more than 20 percent between 2022 and 2028, according to Global Market Insights. 

Yet, many organizations fail or get stuck in DevOps execution. Gartner research also projects that over 70 percent of DevOps initiatives will fail to meet expectations in 2022.  

This article explores IT Operations Management (ITOM) as an integral approach to achieving DevOps acceleration for modern business enterprises. 

Is DevOps Scalable?

Organizations adopt DevOps to help their teams better coordinate, collaborate, and speed up application delivery. In fact, many organizations continue to reinvent themselves as software and digital services providers through DevOps practices that create environments to deliver value significantly faster. 

However, the question of whether DevOps is scalable always comes up. Before we delve into how ITOM accelerates automation in DevOps, it’ll be good to know whether, in fact, DevOps is scalable. The answer is a resounding yes!

Some factors that make DevOps scalable include automation, the cloud, and open-source technologies.

Automation is crucial to DevOps scalability because it allows organizations to rapidly create environments and deploy new resources.  Cloud technologies are vital because they provide on-demand access to computing infrastructure resources that can be quickly scaled up or down as needed.

Finally, DevOps is mainly built on open-source technologies, which offer more scalability than proprietary solutions. This means that organizations—no matter the size—can quickly adapt and customize their DevOps solutions to meet their specific business needs. 

DevOps Acceleration

DevOps combines development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) by uniting processes, people, and technology in application planning, development, operations, and delivery. 

By adopting a DevOps culture and best practices, teams can better respond to business application development needs through increased confidence in developed applications and achieving business goals faster. 

Enterprises need to start small, take one step at a time, and allow teams to be innovative with space for continuous learning about new ways to facilitate DevOps acceleration. There’s also a need to get feedback after deployment, fix bugs, and focus on continuous delivery to achieve DevOps acceleration. 

On top of that,  ITOM is essential for enterprises that want to accelerate their DevOps initiatives and improve the overall efficiency of their application development and delivery process.

What is ITOM?

IT Operations Management (ITOM) is the strategic management of IT service provisioning and administration. ITOM focuses on managing tools, processes, environments, and configurations that help deliver efficient IT services. 

Think of it as the heart of all IT operations that incorporate the provisioning and orchestration of an organization’s IT infrastructure, including its performance, security, availability, capacity, and monitoring. 

As such, ITOM is critical for effective IT operations, from implementation and maintenance to optimization, and provides the following benefits for business: 

• Helps organizations improve workflows and progressively increase the availability and performance of IT operations, processes, and services 
• ITOM solutions help automate and streamline tasks such as provisioning, monitoring, and incident management
• Help establish and support processes that applications use throughout their life cycles  
• Outlines issues and how to remediate them within an organization which helps reduce outages and improve user experiences  
• Provides the ability to automate various IT operations, which results in reduced operational costs and improved efficiency

Major Advantages of ITOM for DevOps 

The core of DevOps is fast and continuous application development. However, there can be bottlenecks in DevOps execution if a gap exists between development and IT operations. For example, slow and uncoordinated IT operations delivery causes poor communication between teams resulting in project delays. 

ITOM capabilities save the day and play a critical role in enabling DevOps acceleration. Here are the significant benefits of ITOM for DevOps.

• The intelligent automation and analytics in ITOM technologies create a foundation for the success of DevOps tools. For instance, the availability of a configuration management database (CMDB) is created and maintained through ITOM discovery and service mapping tools. CMDB requires constant updates of core changes across native IT discovery and mapping tools and through integration into Cloud Management Systems to match the difference in a digital practice.
• Discovery tools can be used to compare resources in the cloud to the assets and configurations in a central repo in order to identify any differences between them. IT teams can then easily identify cloud resources that introduce problems and risk, then quickly remediate these problems and risks before they disrupt business processes.
• ITOM provides the ability to manage and monitor the complete IT infrastructure, activities, and security, resulting in better resource utilization and improved infrastructure performance
• ITOM for DevOps helps oversee process visibility and control over a variety of endpoints, including servers and devices, in your environments.

DevOps Acceleration through Automation with ITOM

Many that haven’t adopted DevOps automation services often lag behind their rivals in business. 

Several things can go wrong with your databases, hardware infrastructure, cloud vendor limits, or legacy code as you practice DevOps due to human errors during updates. Or, it can be unplanned architectural changes resulting in slow queries and blocked data access, eventually causing performance issues and downtime. 

As such, DevOps teams must be aware of the risks or pitfalls that can end up hindering their DevOps initiatives. Typically, organizations succeeding in DevOps acceleration leverage automation in DevOps. 

ServiceNow is the main ITOM provider in the industry. Specifically, ServiceNow helps make proactive operations a reality by renovating how your IT teams work together across DevOps, operations, security, and other departments. ServiceNow DevOps solutions seamlessly integrate with numerous tools and processes to manage code development, testing, and deployment. 

When you implement ServiceNow DevOps tools, your Dev, Ops, and QA teams work collaboratively. Its Enterprise DevOps platform is built on a core operational IT services management platform comprising capabilities that enable organizations to deliver better quality service faster. 

Whether for IT decision makers, Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) teams, Developers, DevOps teams, etc., ServiceNow allows your teams to define configuration policies and standardization, as well as identify compliance violations and remediate them. 

Accelerate DevOps Automation with Cloudify and ServiceNow

The suitable infrastructures and environments are necessary to uphold your IT and business operations in a way that won’t slow your application delivery. 

However, many organizations face infrastructure access challenges with providers due to legal and regulatory barriers during adoption or expansion. 

ServiceNow provides a solution by helping your organization achieve DevOps acceleration through automation with ITOM. The service helps make accurate predictions on issues and prevent them from occurring before they can impact users or your business. This DevOps automation service also helps automate tasks, monitor events, and enhance collaboration for your IT teams. 

Cloudify provides infrastructure automation using Environment-as-a-Service technology to deploy and continuously manage cloud environments. 

The good news—together Cloudify and ServiceNow now provide robust and straightforward DevOps automation services. The partnership allows users to access Cloudify from within ServiceNow to automate the resolution of environment drift issues identified by ITOM Discovery and to automate the remediation of cloud configuration governance policy violations identified by ITOM. 

Cloudify’s integration with ServiceNow ITOM offers solutions through the following: 

• Providing automatic provisioning, change management, and governance in your multi-cloud infrastructure for your DevOps and CCoE teams
• Automatically executing the remediation actions and sustaining a single pane of glass for cloud environments used in CI/CD pipelines
• Managing the development, testing, and production environments by importing existing automation templates, converting them into certified environments, and automatically provisioning them
• Allowing users to design remediation actions for compliance operations and apply the correct remediation change for the specific violation
• Allowing developers to deploy or perform day-2 operations as a self-service directly through ServiceNow

Conclusion 

Companies that failed to adopt leaner manufacturing processes in the 20th Century lost out to those that did. Similarly, organizations that overlook the need to adopt DevOps automation in the modern applications development world will lag behind their competitors. 

That’s why contemporary software organizations must wrap their heads around DevOps acceleration with ITOM to defend and expand their market opportunities. 

Wise IT decision-makers are already implementing IT operations management (ITOM) best practices to accelerate DevOps automation. If you have not done that for your business, you’d be wise to follow suit. By leveraging Cloudify with ServiceNow ITOM for DevOps acceleration, you’ll achieve your DevOps strategy and outcomes significantly faster!