What’s the role of IT operations management in improving infrastructure visibility?

The modern business IT environment is often a complicated one comprising a sprawling mix of on premises and cloud workloads, as well as a patchwork of microservices and containerized applications.

IT teams have to maintain and secure this highly dynamic infrastructure that can change from day to day. Without firm visibility over all this, it’s impossible to understand potential issues in the pipeline from downtime that could breach partner contracts to flaws hackers can exploit.

There’s no replacement for humans in getting on top of all this, nor a shortcut for setting up a proper strategy to cut through sprawl. Businesses looking to build on their hard work and maintain oversight of their existing infrastructure can turn to IT operations management (ITOM) to help.

ITOM is automated by nature and uses both AI and machine learning (ML) – primarily in the form of predictive analytics – to help analyze data drawn from across an enterprise environment. This is brought together to form a living, breathing picture of infrastructure and identify potential issues before they arise. It can be applied to operational improvements, provisioning, and security to ensure IT workers and leaders have a comprehensive, up-to-date understanding of their infrastructure.

ITOM goes far beyond acting as a simple dashboard for IT infrastructure. For example, IT operations teams can apply it to generate and update dependency maps, to better understand how downtime in specific systems would affect the operations of the wider business.

This can be a major help for teams that are otherwise struggling to identify and understand the connections between disparate parts of their business infrastructure, such as in organizations still heavily reliant on legacy technology. With ITOM assets such as Freshworks’ Freshservice, leaders can pinpoint exactly which legacy systems are load-bearing in their IT infrastructure and factor this into modernization plans.

The reverse is also true, with ITOM capable of automatically isolating legacy systems by running them with restricted privileges and corporate network access until they can be replaced, such as when outdated on premises workloads are replaced by cloud processes.

ITOM for IoT

Infrastructure is getting steadily more complicated over time and, on top of the visibility gap between on premise and cloud, IT teams have to contend with physical infrastructure including the myriad devices on which their businesses depend.

One of the areas that’s growing the fastest is the Internet of Things (IoT). IoT devices are already in use across enterprise environments from smart devices in the office to sophisticated sensors on the factory floor. According to IoT Analytics data, there were 21.1 billion IoT devices around the world at the end of 2025 and 39 billion expected to be operational by 2030.

Without automated monitoring and oversight, it can be difficult for IT workers to map all the IoT devices their business uses – and harder still to ensure these devices are patched against vulnerabilities. Put simply, there’s no way that IT workers could manually monitor and maintain all the background systems necessary for keeping modern business afloat.

Lack of oversight could come with a far higher cost than outages as IoT devices pose a significant risk if left unchecked, acting as an entry point for attackers and facilitating lateral attacks.

With its automated discovery capabilities, ITOM can produce comprehensive maps for IoT networks on an enterprise-wide scale and log this information in a database for easy human oversight and auditing.

Another important aspect of ITOM in the long term is how it helps organizations maintain an up-to-date paper trail for their compliance obligations.

Take the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), which compels firms to map asset and system dependencies including any reliance on third-party software, as well as to identify potential IT risks.

ITOM can play a role here, first in providing the information leaders need to assess their resilience and dependencies in a holistic manner and as a tool for continuous monitoring of new third-party connections that come online.

Keeping the lights on with ITOM

Beyond mapping and monitoring critical processes, ITOM can help to provision adequate resources to potentially overlooked services to ensure continuity in IT infrastructure. For example, ITOM tools can draw in context such as peak time of year for sales to allocate more server capacity ahead of increased website traffic for consumer-facing companies.

Automated asset management and resource allocation of this kind has the added benefit of reducing manual strain on ITOps workers, freeing them to focus their attention on tasks that require more targeted human oversight.

It’s also not always easy to identify the workloads that are most important to keeping infrastructure afloat, particularly for those businesses in the midst of digital transformation journeys. In this case, as laid out above, ITOM can produce invaluable visualizations and maps to help ITOps teams figure out where to allocate resources.

As the AI systems underpinning ITOM mature, this will only become a more automatic process, increasingly preventing system outages and the eleventh-hour scrambles by IT teams to remedy them to the past. Beyond improved worker happiness, this has a direct impact on the bottom line.

For example, Freshworks implemented Freshservice ITOM within its Network Operations Center (NOC), a Chennai and Hyderabad-based team within the organization that oversees its incident response activities.

As a direct result of implementing its ITOM modules, Freshworks recorded a 78% decrease in alert noise, as well as $500,000 in dodged service level agreement (SLA) penalties through a consistent 99.8% or higher uptime.

The costs of downtime to businesses can be severe, with a recent report by Fluke Corporation finding UK organizations lose up to £736 million per week to outages.

With ITOM at hand, IT teams can cut through the noise to hone in on the services, applications, and interdependent systems that matter the most to their businesses.