Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

IT service management (ITSM) is big business. There are so many tools, vendors, and resellers out there, so how do you choose? If you work in a service desk or ITSM environment, the ITSM tool will be one of your most important spends. The right tool can help customer engagement, improve processes, and support effective incident resolution. As IT continues to recover and evolve in this new, post pandemic reality, “the best ITSM vendor” will mean different things to different people.

Network engineers are constantly looking for ways to improve the security and efficiency of their IT networks. High latency can affect the user experience and security measures can have costly impacts on the organization. And splitting the organization’s assets into different networks instead of one single large network achieves this. It reduces network collisions and computing demands from the devices and improves efficiency and improves the user experience.

Even with advances in security practices and technologies, passwords continue to remain a weak point in an organization’s cyber security strategy. Strong passwords are still an essential part of security strategy for most organizations, and poor password hygiene can make their IT network vulnerable. According to the 2021 Verizon data breach investigation report, shared credentials and poor access management practices were among the top reasons for data breaches all over the globe.

The benefits of ITIL to a company or organization are widely discussed. This makes sense for the bigger picture, from the perspective of an organization. Smart organizations these days are adapting an ITIL framework to straighten out their IT service management and achieve business goals. However, it’s not so often you hear the question: what are the ITIL benefits to individuals?

Service management needs to change. The philosophies and understanding that gave way to the original concept of ITSM have been overtaken by time and perspective, rendering them outdated and leaving IT managers grasping with how to move forward. Because the various factors of work are constantly shifting (shown most clearly over the course of the last two years, but broadly true of any given period of time in tech), we need to be limber in our ways of thinking of these concepts.

With the widespread adoption of cloud technology, data centers play a huge role in running key applications and business processes for organizations around the world. In 2022, the IT spending on data centers is expected to be $227 billion, and $237 billion by 2023. To run these datacenters profitably and deliver quality service to their customers, organizations are constantly trying to squeeze out maximum performance from the hardware.

Ever since it was first introduced, ITIL has become one of the leading frameworks for IT service management. With its clearly defined processes and services as well as logical distribution of roles and responsibilities, ITIL has helped organizations streamline their IT process and deliver value to stakeholders. The framework has helped organizations in their digital transformation by bringing together the stakeholder’s vision and the IT department's implementation.

The first rule of change management is that people don't like to change, and anyone involved in managing a major change will tell you this is all too true. WIIFM is an acronym that stands for What Is In It For Me. In essence, it’s a truth that leverages some cold, hard facts about human nature to actually facilitate change. So, while it’s a bit of philosophical insight, it’s also a useful tool for organizational change. WIIFM helps by doing three things.

Management is also often about accountability. Well, let’s scratch that, it’s always about accountability. And when it comes to IT Service Management (ITSM), that accountability goes double, because we’re dealing with processes that cover your entire organizational structure. That’s when the RACI matrix comes in, an acronym that’s so fundamental that it’s covered by the ITIL Foundation Exam. Today, we’ll learn all about it, and why it can help with service design.

Major incidents are, by their very nature, stressful and intense. The ITIL 4 definition of a major incident is: High-stress situations can cause conflict that left unchecked could delay the fix effort. Since we already have a definitive guide on incident management, this blog post will focus specifically on the major incident management process.