IT Operations and Management in 2022: Focus on Automation

2022 was a busy year across all segments of the IT operations and management space.

IT operations and management have become increasingly complex in recent years and particularly in 2022, as organizations have been tasked with supporting hybrid workforces, building increasingly complex applications with less staff, and automating more workloads than ever before.

Related: When – and When Not – to Outsource IT Operations

The big trends and news in 2022 in the IT operations and management space were largely driven by technologies designed to help organizations deal with new and existing challenges.

IT Service Management Capabilities Expanded in 2022

Among the most foundational technologies in the ITOps space are those for IT service management (ITSM). 

ITSM technologies help organizations manage and maintain the services provided to users. There are multiple ITSM platforms and related capabilities, including ServiceNow, Atlassian, and PagerDuty, which all had news in 2022.

Related:Is NoOps and a Future of Fully Automated IT Operations Within Reach?

In May, ServiceNow announced capabilities designed to help organizations more easily scale applications and DevOps. One of the features that debuted is the Service Operations Workspace, which helps improve collaboration and visibility into the state of IT operations across an organization. In September, the ServiceNow Tokyo platform came out, bringing with it a set of new components, including Enterprise Asset Management (EAM); Supplier Lifecycle Management (SLM); and Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) Management capabilities.

A challenge for many organizations in 2022 was figuring out how to effectively manage hybrid workforce needs. That's the issue that ServiceNow Workplace Scenario Planning, launched in November, aims to help solve.

PagerDuty also had an active year updating its technologies. Demand for PagerDuty's services has been increasing due to the growing requirements of IT operations. In November, PagerDuty Operations Cloud rolled out its fall update, providing new capabilities to help teams with incident workflows.

"Modern work is no longer ticket-based; it's driven by events and incidents," commentedPagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada. "PagerDuty is purpose-built to efficiently facilitate and automate the type of work that's essential to modern business success, who needs to perform it, and how it will be managed."

Atlassian, which is often most closely associated with its DevOps platform capabilities, pushed further into ITSM in 2022 as well, expanding the capabilities of its Jira Service Management offering.

DevOps and CloudOps Continue to Mature

Looking specifically at DevOps, there were a number of noteworthy events and trends during the year.

No discussion of DevOps can be considered complete without mentioning GitHub, which is one of the most widely used code development platforms. Over the course of the year, GitHub had a series of updates, including the release of its Codespaces development service in February, GitHub Desktop 3.0 in April, and new developer tooling announced at GitHub Universe 2022 in November.

On the business side of DevOps, one of the bigger stories of 2022 was Perforce's acquisition of DevOps pioneer Puppet in April. Puppet was one of the earliest DevOps vendors, alongside Chef, which Progress Software acquired in 2020, and Ansible, which Red Hat acquired in 2015.

The infrastructure-as-code (IaC) model for CloudOps also progressed in 2022 with vendors including Hashicorp and Pulumi moving forward. Pulumi took specific aim at boosting the automation of IaC for CloudOps with its Pulumi Deployments technology released in November.

The Key to ITOps Is Increasingly More Automation

Across all sectors of ITOps, the need for more automation was a prevailing theme in 2022, as it was echoed in multiple industry reports and vendor product announcements.

A report from DevOps vendor Transpositin May found that nearly half (48.2%) of organizations view automation as a mechanism to improve mean time to resolution/repair (MTTR).

"I was shocked to see that 83.2% of respondents said up to 50% of their engineering operations processes are automated, and yet human processes — collaboration, capturing human actions, bringing people together, sharing knowledge — are still shown to be highly manual," Divanny Lamas, CEO of Transposit, told ITPro Today.

The Kaseya 2022 IT Operations Reportalso identified the need for more automation — 48% of the 1,877 IT operations professionals who responded to the Kaseya survey identified automation as a top priority for their organizations.

"Automation is one of the biggest drivers to improve IT operations," Mike Puglia, chief customer marketing officer at Kaseya, told ITPro Today."Not only does automation improve efficiency and processes, it also helps with employee retention."