Managing the networking and connectivity elements used by a business can be a challenge, and this is only one of the many difficulties that an enterprise will face with its technological infrastructure. Gone are the days when you had a single IT guy to rely on, and now there are countless branches of IT.



Over the course of today’s guide, we’re going to take a closer look at IT operations management (ITOM). There are plenty of responsibilities that are heaped upon ITOM, and we’ll explore those while also going over the difficulties that ITOM was designed to deal with so you have a better idea of what it does.

What is IT Operations Management (ITOM)?
As the name would suggest IT operations management is the field that is concerned with managing both the internal and external factors that affect a business’s technological elements. There is no single domain that ITOM is tasked with managing, as it deals with both the physical and virtual condition of a business’s infrastructure components.

Some of the things that ITOM employees or ITOM software is tasked with doing include maintaining a help desk that will deal with any issues that employees have. Another focus of ITOM is ensuring that performance monitoring is put in place to ensure maximum availability of a business’s disparate tech services.

These very tech services are often provided by very disparate software and providers, so ITOM is also tasked with maximizing the visibility of these things. All in all, ITOM comes together to optimize the operational capabilities of an organization and its computing assets.

Issues That IT Operations Management (ITOM) is designed to Solve
There are plenty of problems that can arise in a modern organization, and these challenges are mainly the responsibility of IT operations management. Some of the issues that we’re going to cover include computing networking and application, capacity performance and availability, as well as the ability to manage the provisioning capacity of an organization.

Poor Device Health
ITOM workers tend to have the tools needed to manage devices on-site to ensure that they keep operating as smoothly as possible. Most of the time, you’ll operate a service desk to deal with any troubles that employees are having with their gear, but a lot of the job is also preventative.

From ensuring that servers and computers are kept clean of dust to deeper maintenance and monitoring of crucial infrastructure, ITOM services are an essential form of oversight. Keep in mind that ITOM typically consists of monitoring that these things are maintained instead of doing it yourself.

Congested Networks
Another responsibility of IT operations management workers is ensuring that the local network that a business runs off of is running properly. Local networks are a key part of ensuring that the cloud is operating properly, and internet service is a crucial part of any business providing services, tech-based or otherwise.

Ensuring that the applications operating on a network have the right bandwidth allocation can ensure that a business doesn’t end up running into slowdowns that can lessen its effectiveness. This is accomplished through monitoring processes and creating pipelines through which they can receive the right amount of bandwidth.

Poor Configuration Management
Configuration management is a huge part of an ITOM worker’s responsibilities, and this is one of the most time-consuming of them all. Monitoring the configuration of countless applications and software can be challenging, especially if there are plenty of employees that you have to monitor.

This is why one of the critical responsibilities of workers is to ensure that only certain people have access to the assets that can entirely overhaul a platform. If you come across a badly-configured application, it will be your responsibility to reconfigure and optimize it.

Cybersecurity Threats
Even if you’re a small business, the threat of cyberattacks rises daily, and this means that you’ll have to spend resources to monitor your network security. One of the tasks of workers in this field is to take an administrative position to ensure that a business remains safe from cyber attackers.

In many cases, people who work in this IT field are specialized in cybersecurity, and if they’re not, they’ll typically have a security adviser on-hand to ensure that there are no security-based outages. A major cybercrime can even lose an organization all of its information, so this is one of the most crucial things for which IT employees are responsible.

Slow Application Performance
The final thing that these workers are tasked with countering is slow performance on a variety of applications. Some of the most common issues that you’ll run into when apps are running slow is poor network management, a slow server, or even issues with the configuration of the applications themselves.