Over the years many new technologies have been evolving faster than the teams can adopt skills about them and also bringing in a plethora of new terminology which looks quite similar by name but actually hold different attributes altogether such as ITOps, DevOps, CloudOps, AIOps, and even NoOps.  

Today we look more in detail about two important terminologies ITOps and CloudOps , understand their key differences, benefits and purpose they adopted for.  

What is ITOps? 

ITOps stands for Information Technologies operation or IT operations which refers to a process and service administration by organizations used in their IT. In today’s world every organization uses computer systems to drive its business and provide key services. 

IT operations comprises the underlying organization of computer hardware, software, networks, applications, services and security which keeps every other part of business running and growing. 

In the past this was used in conjunction with on premises data centres and other supporting equipment such as UPS, Power supply, Printers etc. and in today’s world it encompasses cloud computing resources. 

ITOps is identified as a distinct group within the IT department composed of IT operators and managed by their manager who oversees and guides all ITOPs. They are also responsible for management, payments and procurements. 

Benefits of ITOps

• ITOPs plays a critical role to accomplish business goals
• Stability and reliability of IT ecosystem
• IT empowerment to achieve desired organization goals

What is CloudOps?

CloudOps is continuous operation and a short term which refers to cloud operations. It describes the process of management and delivery of cloud computing to infrastructure services from internal to external customers.

The main objective of CloudOps is to keep applications and data securely and function as long as possible in a cloud environment. It is primarily focused on computing resources management. Some of its features are as under:

• Distributed, stateless and scalable in nature
• Infrastructure agonistic
• Highly automated
• Always in active state
• Sharing of resources
• Redundancy  of data 

Benefits of CloudOps

• It is a cost-effective model
• Scalable and flexible
• Speed to market
• Accessible and available
• Data security
• Robust backup and recovery 

Difference between ITOps and CloudOps

Let’s understand the points of difference between ITOps & CloudOps.

Operations

• ITOps: Manual operations with heavy resilience on legacy support of vendors.
• CloudOps: Deep automation and interoperability hence legacy vendor support is minimal. Hardware and network maintenance overhead is taken care by cloud provider hence you can focus on setting up automation for tasks such as regular backups, security checks, patch deployments, access management, application versioning etc.

Monitoring and Customization

• ITOps: Requires lot of customization
• CloudOps: Lot of flexibility for customization, fine grain dashboards. All metrics and actions are logged and available via dashboards and alerts often in real time.

Maintenance

• ITOps: Require manual intervention and not very supportive in predictive errors.
• CloudOps: Self-healing capabilities and can predict future issues efficiently by looking at specific data metrics. AI is used to learn from past resolutions and keep growing number of issues which require to be resolved in future. Predictive analysis helps to alert IT teams for possible failures, issues , errors or security weaknesses.

Protection

• ITOps: Point security architecture and lot of dependency on legacy vendors for patch updates.
• CloudOps: Multi-tiered security architecture, customer and cloud provides have shared responsibility.

Scalability

• ITOps: Requires planning and budgeting for several months and ITOps teams try to balance growing demand for computing resources with the budgets struggling to keep up the growing demands.
• CloudOps: Easy to scale and scale down as per the demand of applications.

Comparison Table: ITOps vs CloudOps

Below table summarizes the comparative points of consideration between the two terminologies: