Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) is a lean technique that has become deeply ingrained in the practices of IT service management (ITSM), DevOps, IT4IT, and Agile (Scrum, SAFe, Kanban). Over a century old, VSM is the best technique to obtain a customer-focused agreement on improving a cross-departmental flow of activities. It’s a simple concept but difficult to begin and sustain in practice. In this article, we will: Let’s begin!

Having a reliable IT infrastructure is crucial to the health of your company or organization. And while this is generally true, it’s doubly so in our current times, where practically everything is digital. So, who is the lucky one to make general decisions about how to run a system efficiently — and keep it going? That would be the System Administrator. But what does a SysAdmin actually do? That's what we'll answer here!

Red team scenarios are frameworks companies use to evaluate their level of security from an adversarial approach. Red teams look for vulnerabilities or security holes in the system by simulating a cyber attack. This helps identify what needs to be improved so that the organization is well-prepared to defend itself against a real-life cyber threat.

Microsoft Active Directory is one of the most popular directory services. As of November 2017, it was being used in 12.8 million organizations with 950 million users, as stated by Alex Simons, director of Program Management for the Microsoft Identity Division. Initially previewed in 1999, Active Directory (AD) became so ubiquitous that it was later a general term for other similar services.

Creating a business plan is hard in itself, but keeping it during a crisis requires a high level of expertise. Luckily, you can prepare your company for disruptive situations beforehand with the help of business continuity planning. Since the pandemic, we’re even more aware of how disasters and disruptions can hit anyone, any industry, in any way or form. It disrupted supply chains, made a majority of the workforce work from home, and introduced a rapid lifestyle shift all over the world.

Google has introduced so many innovations that it’d be impossible to list them all. And we’re not just talking about the obvious things like search engine algorithms or nearly-ubiquitous programs and apps (Google Maps, Docs, Gmail) — not even self-driving cars. Today, we’re going to talk about one such innovation: Site Reliability Engineering. In a nutshell, SRE it’s a practical framework for software development that improves on even giants like DevOps. Wait, what?

The ITIL 4 Foundation Edition introduced the service value chain in 2019, as an operating model to facilitate value realization. We’ve first talked about the topic on our Definitive Guide on ITIL, but it’s time to expand on the concept to understand: So, make sure to keep reading – we’ve thrown some useful examples on how the service value chain works!

So, you want to become a DevOps engineer? It’s a stimulating, challenging, high-paying career choice, but the lynchpin role holds software development and operations together. We’ve compiled a DevOps roadmap that includes all the steps required to fill the shoes of a DevOps expert. As you know, DevOps is a set of practices and tools to integrate and automate processes between IT and software development teams.

The continuous debate around artificial intelligence (AI) has led to a lot of confusion. There are many terms around it that appear to be similar, but when you take a closer look at them, that perception is not entirely accurate. For that reason, here we take our best shot and oppose AI vs. machine learning vs. deep learning vs. neural networks to set them apart once and for all. In short, we’ll look at how they all relate to each other, and what makes them different in their particular way.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are a crucial part of Service Level Management, and therefore one of the key components of IT service management. They are the basis for building and delivering IT services, and play a key role in ensuring that both the client and the service provider are on the same page and that the service delivery is at par with or exceeds customer expectations.