New Year, New Approaches to Tackling IT Operations Management

As businesses evolve and delivery speeds increase, IT operations teams face environments where downtime isn’t an option. The traditional ways of operations management are over – modernization and holistic approaches are now essential. For IT operations (ITOps) teams, 2025 means reassessing technology stacks, processes, and people.

Success in tackling modernization of IT operations management starts with assessing where your team is. These three fundamental questions can guide you toward IT resiliency, observability, and security that meets the needs of the rapid pace of business.

What to do with all the technology?

The ITOps software market is in flux, with AI-focused startups disrupting established players. In many companies, solutions are purchased at the business unit level, leading to an explosion of operations, monitoring, and security tools. In customer conversations, we’ve noted that at minimum, customers have 10-15 operational tools. This year, it’s important to reassess how tools are being used.

Recommendations

• Drive collaboration: Purchases of software often happen without broader knowledge – leading to redundancy and data gaps in IT monitoring. Learning where tools overlap across teams is critical to limiting information silos.
• Evaluate, fail, or succeed, then proceed: Agile approaches need to be part of your operations practice. If a solution is not working or meeting your needs, it’s important to move on quickly. Set a success/failure threshold to avoid wasting time on ineffective products.
• Understand the interconnectivity and automation: If you’re spending time and money with a human in the loop for data delivery to a solution, it might be time to look at how that process can be automated.

Where does the legacy sit with the new?

Automation and AI are pushing organizations forward but the reality is that the core systems that run our business still exist. While a cloud-first company may not have on-prem legacy systems, most companies are running an IBM Z or IBM i for transactional data processes. Delivering data from IBM systems on a delay to ITOps platforms is a recipe for service disruptions. Anyone considering modernizing their approach to operations, needs to take a hard look at the integrations and connectivity of their on-prem tech stack.

Recommendations

• Automate data capture: Ditch the spreadsheets and centrally capture data changes as they happen. This is crucial for correlating events, understanding patterns, and detecting anomalies.
• Identify valuable legacy data: IBM Z and IBM i systems contain rich data sets that can help enhance AIOps approaches and predictive incident management. Examples of datasets include – privileged users, access to failures, and customer data.
• Align modernization with business goals: Focus on improving legacy system connectivity to modern ITOps platforms in areas that align with business objectives. This helps you focus on which systems and processes to tackle first with the biggest impact.

What should you look for in a solution?

Reconciling investments may also mean you now need to also look to new offerings that can help you build bridges between your old and new tech stacks. Think of this type of investment from the perspective of time and labor. No more spreadsheets? Time, effort and labor costs saved. Limiting the hours spent on an incident bridge looking at old data? Time, effort, and labor costs saved.

Recommendations

• Seek solutions that make legacy data accessible: IBM Z and IBM i data requires expertise for extraction. Look for solutions that remove or limit this barrier to entry. Solutions should deliver data in a format readable for downstream ITOps platform users.
• Ask about advanced filtering and easy configuration: Any vendor you’re investigating to aggregate legacy  data should be able to give you the tools to refine data to meet your needs for delivery. Advanced filtering and configuration ensure the right metrics reach the target system for monitoring removing information overload.
• Support for multiple targets: Modernization could mean expansion, consolidation, or migration. As you build out the ITOps tech stack that works for you, the delivery of IBM data should happen to any system that you’re using. Make sure you have a vendor in place that can manage the delivery of data to one or multiple platforms – helping you to save time one rework in the future as your needs evolve.

What’s next?

Modernizing IT operations requires a strategic, incremental approach. By consolidating tools, improving automation, and bridging the gap between legacy and modern systems, organizations can meet the demands of 2025 and beyond. Now is the time to critically evaluate your IT ecosystem and take actionable steps toward a more resilient, observable, and secure future.

In the modern landscape, IT teams can no longer rely on a single platform or vendor to meet their needs for operational analytics, security monitoring, event management, and more. Most are piecing together the best features from various platforms to create a solution with the compatibility, coordination, and scalability necessary to meet their goals.  This approach helps IT teams reduce risks, cut costs, and enhance operational experiences while staying accountable for the results they deliver.

Read our white paper Optimizing IT Operations – Strategies for Integrating IBM Z and IBM i Systems and learn more about how IT teams are reducing risks, cutting costs and enhancing operational experiences while staying accountable for the results they deliver.