In a time when so many businesses are facing challenges in the world of IT, you need to stay one step ahead of the problems dogging at the heels of your enterprise. While many leaders at a variety of companies tend to arrive at complex solutions for complex situations, you stand to benefit most from taking a path of simplicity.
By adhering to new and emerging IT operations best practices that are leading the businesses of today to success, you can find similar success for yourself.
Key Takeaways:
- Automation is a best practice built on constantly improving technology that aids in innovation, cost management, and remediation.
- Application development and deployment in the cloud is another trend that improves IT operations for organizations willing to make the migration to the cloud itself.
- Centralization is a practice that is particularly beneficial to organizations operating in a hybrid or multicloud environment as it simplifies the management of a complex distributed environment.
To find the best way forward for your organization, take the time to ask yourself if you are following the important best practices utilized by successful businesses across the IT industry.
What are IT operations best practices?
IT operations best practices are the processes and procedures that yield the highest ROI and the most efficiency when developing, deploying, or maintaining in an IT environment. These are typically widely recognized practices acknowledged as “the best” across the entire industry.
Following best practices also means prioritizing security as well as outcomes. For example, a zero trust approach to IT security is objectively the best practice to uphold.
Observing, researching, and implementing best practices in your enterprise are necessary steps toward keeping your business modern and ensuring that the competition does not outpace you in terms of innovation. The “tried-and-true” approach can only take you so far in an industry where the tools and skills at your disposal can become outdated legacy practices in just a few years.
In a time of rampant digital transformation and data proliferation, the most important IT operations best practices are those that promote simplicity for the user even as the underlying infrastructure grows exponentially more complex.
1. Automation
Automation is a rapidly growing practice in many industries including the IT sector, and for good reason. Automating simple processes frees up administrators and entire teams so they can focus on more innovative tasks.
Automation benefits both developers and operators, bringing the two sides closer together. This is the basis of the DevOps philosophy, which can lead to a swifter delivery of applications and services.
Cost management is one example of a common enterprise practice that requires real-time governance, but the implementation of sophisticated automation ensures that spending is constantly adjusted as necessary and in real-time, all without the need for continuous human supervision.
The end user even benefits directly from automated remediation solutions as an IT operations best practice that empowers them to troubleshoot and resolve an issue in minutes rather than wait for a reply from specialized personnel.
2. Cloudification
As companies strive to meet the growing demand of producing ever more applications and data, it becomes increasingly difficult to accommodate all those workloads in physical datacenters. Therefore, cloud migration is quickly becoming an industry-standard best practice.
Shifting to cloud native operations brings many potential benefits to the enterprise. Migrating to the cloud allows developers to efficiently package applications as containers and architect them as collections of microservices. Those applications can then deploy swiftly over elastic cloud infrastructure.
Whether shifting entirely to the public cloud or simply extending on-premises practices to the cloud for a hybrid approach, adopting cloud native development solutions is a strong choice for improving or even future-proofing operations.
Gartner highlights cloud migration as a growing IT operations best practice and explains that the key drivers influencing the decision to cloudify are enhanced functionality, increased usability, and a more robust user interface. With the right cloud platform, you can reap these benefits without the need to add complexity to your existing operations.
3. Centralization
In a complex and varied IT environment, such as a hybrid cloud or multicloud ecosystem, centralization is vital. Without it, you will never have a single comprehensive view of the entire network.
Centralization refers to the ability of IT personnel to perform a wide range of tasks or processes from a central location. For example, an ideal cloud platform allows the operator to view and manage every cloud in the environment from a single, central control plane.
Another key advantage of centralization versus decentralization is a potential reduction in expenses for physical hardware as well as software applications and support services.
The best cloud solution layers abstraction software over the entire cloud ecosystem, allowing for the IT operations best practice of interacting with each cloud using only a single interface and a single set of tools. The less desirable alternative is to learn a different management process for every single cloud in the ecosystem.
The simple way to follow IT operations best practices
Automation, cloudification, and centralization are among the most crucial practices that every IT department should be considering. Implementing principles of these best practices into your development process can bring untold benefits, but you need a simple way to do so that does not disrupt your operations.
The Nutanix Cloud Platform (NCP) is the infrastructure that makes it easy to integrate these best practices into your everyday operations. Nutanix accomplishes this with a focus on simplicity, meaning that you can adhere to industry-proven best practices without complicating your current workflow.
Addressing the complex problems of today’s IT landscape should not entail further complexity. Instead, prioritizing simplicity in the implementation of IT operations best practices will ensure an accessible path to the future.
Learn more about cost savings that are possible through the adoption of best practices as well as the optimization of apps in a cloud built for efficiency.
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