Why do enterprises need IT operations management?
ITOM tools help to maintain service availability, reduce downtime, improve visibility, and support scalable hybrid cloud environments
Modern enterprises rely on complex, always-on digital ecosystems, but as infrastructure increasingly spreads across data centers, cloud, SaaS tools, and distributed networks, maintaining operational stability becomes much harder. This can eventually lead to significant downturns in both employee productivity and overall business efficiency.
In fact, according to a recent study by Freshworks, IT complexity now accounts for 7% of total annual revenue loss for an average business. That’s about the same size as a typical R&D budget, effectively erasing innovation investment and significantly slowing the pace of progress.
For this reason, a growing number of enterprises are adopting IT operations management (ITOM), which helps simplify complex IT environments by providing the visibility, control, and automation necessary to ensure services remain reliable, secure, and scalable at all times.
What Is ITOM?
ITOM refers to the processes and technologies that enable IT systems to run efficiently, encompassing monitoring, event management, resource provisioning, service mapping, and capacity planning. Enterprises rely on ITOM to identify issues promptly, maintain uptime, and ensure the seamless delivery of business-critical services. It plays a complementary role to IT service management (ITSM) by focusing on the health and performance of the underlying operational stack.
Why ITOM matters for modern enterprises
Enterprises face increasing expectations for speed, reliability, and continuity, which means even minor service disruptions can significantly impact customer trust. Without ITOM, many IT teams struggle to manage incident volume, identify root causes, and understand how system dependencies affect business operations.
Hybrid cloud environments add further complexity. Applications are distributed across vendors, networks, and architectures, making centralized visibility essential. ITOM helps enterprises operate proactively rather than reactively, reducing firefighting, improving efficiency, and ensuring stable digital services.
Five core capabilities of ITOM
Monitoring and event management: ITOM provides continuous visibility into infrastructure, applications, networks, and cloud assets. Automated event filtering and correlation enable teams to identify the true root causes rather than sifting through noise.
Asset discovery and service mapping: Modern tools automatically detect IT assets and map their dependencies. This ensures configuration accuracy and provides clarity when diagnosing service-impacting incidents.
Performance and capacity optimization: Teams can anticipate resource needs, avoid bottlenecks, and optimize utilization. Proactive planning reduces unexpected outages and improves overall service reliability.
Automation and orchestration: Routine tasks, such as remediation scripts, patching, scaling, and restarts, can be automated to reduce manual load. Automation also shortens incident resolution times and lowers operational risk.
Governance, compliance, and security: By maintaining consistent configurations and enforcing operational policies, ITOM helps organizations stay compliant and reduce exposure to vulnerabilities.
What are the main business benefits of ITOM?
Once in place, ITOM ensures IT infrastructure operates efficiently and aligns with broader organizational goals. This results in a number of business benefits, including:
Reduced downtime and faster incident resolution: Centralized monitoring and automated remediation shorten mean time to resolution (MTTR) and reduce the impact of disruptions.
Improved service reliability: Proactive detection prevents failures before they affect users, ensuring higher uptime and consistent performance.
Lower operational costs: Resource optimization, automation, and fewer outages lead to measurable cost savings.
Better decision-making through visibility: Real-time dashboards and accurate service maps help leaders understand operational risk and prioritize investments effectively.
Stronger user and customer experiences: Stable systems improve employee productivity and deliver smoother digital experiences.
ITOM’s role in digital transformation and hybrid cloud
As enterprises increasingly adopt cloud services, microservices, and remote-first operations, their environments become more distributed and harder to manage manually. ITOM ensures operational consistency across these environments by providing unified monitoring, accurate service dependencies, and automation to handle scale.
Some modern platforms, such as Freshservice, also offer additional capabilities, including service mapping, AI-driven recommendations, and automated workflows, to help teams support large-scale digital operations without compromising reliability. This turns ITOM into a strategic enabler for transformation, allowing organizations to innovate while maintaining control over performance, cost, and risk.
How to get started with ITOM
Organizations looking to get started with ITOM often begin by focusing on visibility, including monitoring, discovery, and topology mapping. From there, they establish structured event management, introduce automation for repetitive tasks, and integrate ITOM with ITSM workflows for better impact analysis.
Modern ITOM solutions facilitate the gradual adoption of capabilities by providing intuitive tools for configuration management, observability, and automated remediation, enabling enterprises to build maturity without overly complex deployments.
Summary
ITOM provides the foundation for proactive operations, improved service health, and better resource utilization. As infrastructure becomes more complex and distributed, ITOM ensures businesses can deliver consistent end-user experiences, reduce operational risk, and support ongoing digital transformation.
FAQ
Q: How does ITOM differ from IT service management (ITSM)?
A: ITOM focuses on managing the technical infrastructure itself, while ITSM focuses on delivering and supporting IT services for users. ITOM maintains the health of systems, while ITSM manages processes, such as incidents and service requests, that are built upon those systems.
Q: What problems does ITOM solve?
A: ITOM helps prevent outages, improves performance, and speeds up issue detection and resolution. It provides visibility into infrastructure health, enables automation of routine tasks, and ensures that resources are used efficiently across on-premises and cloud environments.
Q: What tools are commonly used for ITOM?
A: ITOM typically relies on monitoring platforms to track performance, incident and event management tools to respond to issues, automation tools to handle repetitive work, and configuration or asset management systems to keep infrastructure organized and compliant.
Q: What skills are important for IT operations teams?
A: Key skills include understanding servers, networks, and cloud platforms; using scripting and automation; working with monitoring and observability tools; and handling incidents effectively. Familiarity with ITIL or similar frameworks also helps teams manage processes smoothly.
