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The Emergence of IT Operations and Support Hybrid Models
The Emergence of IT Operations and Support Hybrid Models

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In an environment of ongoing digital acceleration and transformation, every IT function continually reinvents itself to respond to the growing pipeline of business demands. While this reinvention is essential, it is also imperative to re-think the function of application and infrastructure operations, commonly termed IT Support.

The scope of these support operations begins in with help desk support and operations, extending to the more advanced second and third levels of defense. However, the capability spectrum required for a traditional IT support organization has broadened significantly, to keep in pace with the speed of development. 

Support teams have responsibilities and an ever-increasing need for high availability. Therefore, it is necessary for them to embrace capabilities like sustainability and reliability engineering that complements ITIL and Agile DevOps principles to proactively detect and fiercely defend production environments from outages and instability.

Support activities are no longer interruption-driven but are pivoting to predictive models and patterns driven by AIOps to prevent a disruption before it occurs. The capability of a support team in the current days hence has become supported by a wide range of skills, namely technology, business, management, and data science.

The technical capabilities for a robust structure range from the back-end network, to modern virtualization, to the cloud, to interfaces and connectivity between different infrastructure and application components, to storage and capacity management, to design of redundancies for application availability and data recovery.

The robust structure demand requires a close working relationship and understanding of different technology skills, ranging from infrastructure engineering to application development. Traditional health checks are replaced by continuous detection and continuous healing models that are non-invasive and transparent. Skills required to identify and automate these scenarios are becoming very important, with the entire incident management process itself shifting toward a self-service model.

Moreover, understanding of business problems solved by IT combined with a deeper appreciation of the functions and features, is imperative to support organizations so they can better triage when they have to react or continuously work on preventive actions. Standard operating procedures and run books are getting redesigned with technology, processes and business integrations for better impact assessment to select the scope of restoration. Constant calibration of resources usage thresholds, performance and capacity planning for volumes are tightly integrated with the business needs.

Scaling Skills and Competencies

Every support professional today requires project management and data analytical skills to identify and initiate the right improvement initiatives. There is a clear trend to spend efforts on preventive or transformational activities rather than on reactive ones as this reduces firefighting, toil, and potential instability, thus increasing the productivity and improving the quality of work.

Leveraging technology to create better tools for support teams to detect and prevent, or quickly recover from an incident, is where efforts are optimally invested. Operations and support activities are like quality and security controls for the continuous code-drops into production, which is no easy feat given the business agility and responsiveness expected. Hence support team’s early engagement and deeper involvement as part of DevOps and DevSecOps and insights from deep operational data analysis becomes key for the operational success.

Most importantly, communication and stakeholder or client management skills are further emphasized as integral skills as technology moves closer to the business and has an active role to play in real-time when there is a business impact. Hence, the genuine interest and commitment for faster restoration or prevention of an outage by contributing to the design, are the most expected attributes in today’s support functions within organizations.

 

About the author

Uma Rudhran, VP, Infrastructure Engineering, Fiserv Global Services
Uma Rudhran, VP, Infrastructure Engineering, Fiserv Global Services

 


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