Modern IT Operations: Key Processes & 6 Best Practices

As organizations shift to cloud-native architectures and automation-first strategies, legacy approaches to ITOps can’t keep up. 

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Modern IT operations teams are now managing hybrid infrastructure, supporting DevOps pipelines, enforcing security policies, and automating routine tasks — all while keeping systems stable and users happy.

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In this article, we’ll cover: 

• The fundamentals of modern IT operations
• Core IT operations processes
• Tools and frameworks that support IT business operations
• 6 best practices to implement

Let’s kick things off by breaking down what modern IT operations actually looks like.

What are modern IT operations?

Modern IT operations are all about running cloud-native infrastructure securely and reliably, and with as little manual effort as possible. Instead of managing physical servers and reacting to tickets, ITOps teams now automate environments, monitor systems in real-time, and work closely with dev teams to support fast, stable deployments.

Traditional vs. modern IT operations

Modern ITOps is a big shift from traditional ITOps. Same mission (keep systems reliable, performant, and secure), but totally different mindset, tooling, and day-to-day approach.

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Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Automation-first: Routine tasks like provisioning servers, applying patches, or responding to alerts are increasingly automated using tools such as Ansible, Puppet, or low-code workflow builders. Help desk is also smarter. Think self-service portals, Slack bots that guide users through password reset protocols, and workflows that automatically resolve common issues.
• Cloud-native infrastructure: Modern ITOps teams run infrastructure in the cloud, including AWS, Azure, GCP, and hybrid environments. Common tools in this space include Terraform or Pulumi to spin up environments on demand and Kubernetes to orchestrate containers.
• Collaborative with DevOps: ITOps now works closely with developers. They help run CI/CD pipelines, manage infrastructure as code, and keep production stable during rapid release cycles. In some orgs, they’re basically part of the platform team.
• Integrated observability: Modern ITOps relies on real-time monitoring and AI-driven alerts to detect and resolve issues faster. They use these insights to spot problems before users even notice them.
• Security and compliance: As infrastructure becomes more complex, ITOps is increasingly responsible for enforcing security best practices and automating compliance checks across systems and environments.
• Agile and scalable: They can scale infrastructure up or down in minutes, deploy new environments on demand, and adapt to changing workloads without disruption.

These shifts not only improve day-to-day operations but also support enterprise architecture goals around automation, governance, agility, and long-term scalability.

Key IT operations processes

Modern ITOps covers a wide range of responsibilities, but most of the day-to-day work falls into a few core categories. 

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Below are some of the main IT operations examples:

Incident management 

When something breaks, slows down, or behaves unexpectedly, ITOps is usually the team responding to the issue. They’ll triage tickets, look into root causes, and implement fixes. If it’s a recurring problem, they’ll dig deeper to apply long-term solutions.

Change & release management 

ITOps handles change in a controlled way. That means tracking deployments, documenting infrastructure updates, and minimizing disruption when rolling out new systems or updates. They often use configuration management databases (CMDBs) and change control workflows to understand impact and reduce risk.

Infrastructure & cloud management 

ITOps teams are responsible for provisioning and maintaining servers, whether on-premises or in the cloud. They make sure storage, networking, and compute resources are available and scalable. They're also the ones monitoring system health, managing uptime, and keeping an eye on costs.

Monitoring & performance management 

ITOps teams set up dashboards, alerts, and logs to track system performance. They constantly watch for slowdowns, errors, or strange behavior and ideally, catch issues before end users do.

Automation & AI integration

Teams use automation to handle repetitive tasks like infrastructure provisioning, patching, user onboarding, backup jobs, and incident remediation. AI is also increasingly pivotal in IT transformation. With AIOps platforms, teams detect anomalies, predict system failures, correlate related alerts, and automate appropriate responses.

Security and compliance

ITOps enforces access policies, configures firewalls, and runs endpoint protection tools. They help identify and respond to security incidents and ensure systems follow internal policies and external standards like SOC 2, HIPAA, or ISO 27001.

Modern IT operations frameworks & models

There are several frameworks, models, and methodologies that modern ITOps teams rely on to run efficiently. 

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These frameworks include:

ITIL & ITSM 

IT Service Management (ITSM) frameworks, such as ITIL provide a structured set of best practices for delivering IT services from incident management and change control to service design and continual improvement. It helps ITOps teams align with business needs, deliver consistent services, and handle incidents in a repeatable, measurable way.

DevOps & Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) 

DevOps is more of a philosophy and set of practices that bring dev and ops together. The goal is to remove silos, automate delivery, and create a smoother path from development to production.

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SRE came out of Google and takes a more engineering-driven approach to operations, with a heavy focus on reliability, automation, and observability. 

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Many companies blend them like this:

• DevOps sets the cultural foundation: Developers and ops collaborate, own their code in production, and build with delivery in mind.
• SRE adds the reliability guardrails: Teams use SLOs, error budgets, and observability tooling to ensure uptime and performance don't get sacrificed in the name of speed.

AIOps & automation 

Not a strict framework, but a model for applying AI/ML to detect, analyze, and respond to IT events. Often used in tandem with traditional monitoring tools. It enhances observability, reduces alert noise, and improves incident response.

What are the biggest challenges in IT operations today?

ITOps teams are expected to support increasingly complex systems, keep everything secure, respond to incidents fast, and somehow reduce costs all while the tech stack keeps changing around them.

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Here are the biggest challenges ITOps teams are facing today:

Tool and infrastructure sprawl

Most orgs run a mix of cloud services, on-prem hardware, SaaS tools, custom apps, and legacy systems. Keeping track of everything let alone standardizing it is a constant battle.

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How to respond: Use centralized infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools like Terraform or Pulumi, standardize naming conventions and configurations, and adopt platforms that unify operations across cloud and on-prem environments.

Pressure to move faster without breaking things

There’s a huge push to do more with less. Faster deployments, quicker incident response, and fewer blockers for dev teams. But speed without structure leads to outages, security gaps, and chaos.

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How to respond: Invest in automation, enforce change management, and work closely with dev teams on deployment practices. 

Security and compliance burden

With more remote work, third-party tools, and cloud services in play, the attack surface is bigger than ever. ITOps teams are expected to enforce policies, manage access, patch systems, and stay audit-ready with a limited headcount.

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How to respond: Automate security tasks where possible (e.g., patching, RBAC, secrets rotation), use tools like Vault or OPA for policy enforcement, and bake compliance checks into your CI/CD pipeline.

Lack of standardization across teams

Different teams may use different monitoring tools, deployment processes, access controls, and naming conventions. That makes handoffs messy, onboarding difficult, and scaling painful.

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How to respond: Build shared frameworks, templates, and tooling across teams. Create internal best practices for observability, deployments, and access management — and make it easy for teams to adopt them.

How Superblocks addresses ITOps challenges

Superblocks is an AI-powered platform for building internal tooling and workflows quickly. Within this scope, it helps ITOps teams tackle the above pain points by:

• Connecting to everything in your stack: You can build unified tools and dashboards that pull from AWS, Datadog, ServiceNow, your internal systems, and basically anything with an API.
• Enabling speedy development: Superblocks helps ITOps teams move faster without sacrificing control. You can turn manual tasks like provisioning, incident response, or access requests into internal apps fast. This is thanks to low-code features like visual builders and AI-supported code generation.
• Baking in security and auditability by default: Superblocks integrates with your existing auth provider, supports granular RBAC, and logs every action for auditability. Monitoring and security are centralized too. You don’t need to rebuild security primitives from scratch every time. 
• Standardizing internal tooling across teams: You get a single platform with consistent UIs, RBAC, logging, and integrations. Even if teams work differently, the underlying structure stays clean and maintainable.

6 best practices for implementing modern IT operations

If you’re looking to implement modern ITOps, some tried-and-true best practices can help you build a team that’s aligned with the business as it grows. 

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They include:

1. Use infrastructure as code: Use tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or Ansible to define your infrastructure in code so it’s version-controlled, repeatable, and auditable.
2. Standardize everything you can: Create shared templates, reusable modules, and baseline configurations for infrastructure, monitoring, and incident response.
3. Prioritize automation: If it’s repetitive, automate it. This might include user onboarding/offboarding, system health checks, backup verification, and basic incident response.
4. Invest in proactive monitoring and incident response: Implement full observability by tracking logs, metrics, traces, and smart alerts to detect issues early and respond quickly. Tools like Datadog, Grafana, and New Relic help you track system health across complex, distributed environments.
5. Align IT operations with business objectives: Your ITOps strategy should support the overall business strategy. To do so, teams should stay plugged in with other teams, participate in planning, and measure how their work supports broader goals.
6. Adopt cloud-based operating models for scalability: Embrace cloud-native services like autoscaling, serverless functions, and managed databases to help your team scale infrastructure without adding complexity.

Which tools and technologies are essential for modern IT operations?

Here’s a breakdown of the core categories and essential tools that modern ITOps teams rely on:

ITSM platforms

Where tickets live, service catalogs are managed, and change processes are tracked.

• ServiceNow: The heavyweight in enterprise ITSM
• Jira Service Management: Lighter weight, more flexible alternative

Cloud & infrastructure management

Modern ITOps is often cloud-native or hybrid, so you need tools to manage infrastructure at scale.

• AWS CloudFormation, Azure ARM, or Google Deployment Manager: Cloud-native IaC
• Kubernetes: Container orchestration and management
• Rancher, OpenShift: Platforms for managing Kubernetes clusters

AIOps & automation tools

Automate everything from patching and deployments to incident response.

• RunDeck / StackStorm: Ops-specific automation platforms for workflows, job scheduling, and incident response 
• Jenkins / GitHub Actions: Automate deployment pipelines and recurring system tasks

Monitoring & logging and observability Solutions

These tools give visibility into system health, performance, and anomalies across environments.

• Prometheus + Grafana: Open-source tools for dashboards and time-series monitoring
• Datadog, New Relic, Dynatrace: Full-stack observability platforms
• ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana): Centralized log management and search
• Splunk: Security monitoring, alerting, and incident response

Standardize your IT operations with Superblocks

Internal tooling sprawl is often the silent killer of standardization in ITOps. When every team builds their own scripts, dashboards, and admin tools using whatever tech is handy, it becomes nearly impossible to enforce best practices across environments. Processes drift, security gaps emerge, and onboarding new teams becomes a struggle.

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Superblocks creates a unified foundation for how internal tools are built, secured and maintained — one that’s structured enough to enforce best practices but flexible enough that teams can still move fast.

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We achieve this balance through:

• Shared tooling foundation: All internal apps are built on the same platform, using the same primitives: APIs, RBAC, UI components, etc. That means every tool whether it’s an incident dashboard or a secrets rotation app follows the same structure, logs actions the same way, and is secured the same way.

• Fast internal tool development: Supports quick development with drag-and-drop UI components, optional AI-assisted code generation, and the ability to write custom scripts or build custom React components.
• Built-in integrations across your stack: Use our 60+ native integrations to connect to ServiceNow, AWS, Datadog, GitHub, and more. Teams don’t have to build isolated tools just to bridge systems.
• Standardized security and governance: SSO, granular RBAC, secrets management, and audit logs are built into the platform. You can also stream metrics, traces, and logs from all your internal tools directly in Datadog, New Relic, Splunk, or any other observability platform.
• Fitting into your existing software delivery workflows: Run automated tests, trigger builds, manage approvals, and deploy apps safely with integrations for GitHub Actions, Jenkins, CircleCI, and more.

If you’d like to see how Superblocks can help your team, check out our 5-minute Quickstart guide or try it for free.