Every business relies on IT, but not every business treats IT operations like a core part of risk management.
Key Takeaways
- Strong IT operations best practices help businesses control costs and keep systems stable.
- Companies need updated playbooks, skilled IT support, and smarter infrastructure planning.
- Hybrid computing, automation, and stronger cybersecurity can improve IT operations management.
News headlines make it painfully obvious that the challenges facing IT teams have gotten larger. But advanced technology has also created new opportunities to improve IT operations and cybersecurity.
Is your organization in the right position to overcome obstacles and benefit? How well you adopt IT operations best practices determines the answer.
HOW IMPORTANT ARE IT OPERATIONS BEST PRACTICES IN 2026?
At its core, operations management is about infrastructure. Anything that impacts network resources also affects your day-to-day operations. Today’s teams have good reasons to take IT Operations Management seriously:
- Experts like Gartner expect DRAM and hard drive costs to continue surging during 2026, increasing 130% by the year’s end.
- A leading DRAM producer estimates that supply shortages will last until at least 2028, and likely into 2030.
- The IT infrastructure squeeze is likely to trickle down to private cloud, SaaS, and enterprise platform pricing.
- Nearly 80% of organizations expect to face significant or severe technical debt because of AI-generated code and security vulnerabilities.
- Both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure experienced major outages and latency issues in 2025.
IT operations management best practices can help your organization ensure adequate compute capacity for user growth while keeping infrastructure costs within budget. The need for platform stability and availability has also come into focus.
WHAT IT OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT BEST PRACTICES AND TRENDS SHOULD YOU IMPLEMENT?
Following ITOM best practices can improve system performance, security, resilience, and resource optimization. Adapt these improvements to your company’s unique data environment.
1. Update your operations management playbook
If your IT team is still following policies and practices from a decade ago, you’re in desperate need of an update. Too much has changed in the last few years in terms of technology, supply chains, IT costs, and cybersecurity. New trends shaping the IT industry have rewritten the game.
It’s worth taking an in-depth look at how your current operations align with the state of IT. By developing a comprehensive map of IT infrastructure, users, and security controls, your team can identify bottlenecks and apply high-tech solutions. Planning IT operations helps you achieve strategic goals, even with complex networks.
2. Extend hardware lifecycles
As memory prices have continued to spike, enterprises have been forced to change their priorities for data center performance. High-quality preventive maintenance and thermal management have become more important than ever. Taking good care of IT equipment can extend the hardware lifecycle significantly, making it one of the best ways to increase your return on investment.
High hardware costs don’t just impact hyperscalers. Any company with on-prem servers needs to assess component prices and develop contingencies ASAP. Of course, the more racks you have, the greater the financial impact on overhead.
3. Partner With Certified and Experienced IT Techs
The market for IT professionals is in a weird place. On the one hand, there is a high demand for experienced engineers, analysts, and specialists. At the same time, publicly traded companies have laid off thousands of qualified developers.
This situation has created a favorable outlook for mid-sized businesses and enterprises looking to fill tech roles, and companies are seizing on the opportunity. Many are shifting away from a break-fix IT model and opting for IT recruitment, staff augmentation, or contract-to-hire options instead.
The expertise these professionals bring to the table can provide long-term benefits for data centers, cloud migration, and other major projects. There has never been a better time to create a skilled in-house team.
4. Outsource infrastructure management
IT infrastructure has gotten more complex for organizations, with hardware, software, virtualization, and data center equipment in the picture:
- High-performance 400G fiber-optics
- Virtual machines and cloud-based data processing
- Edge computing
- IoT devices and automation
- AI controls, shadow IT, and mobile device security
- Electrical and HVAC systems
The knowledge required to engineer, manage, and improve such interconnected IT systems exceeds the in-house capabilities of many SMBs. Even enterprise-level organizations are seeing the value of outsourced IT asset management.
Hardware scarcity isn’t the only factor driving this change. Data center stability is tied to local energy grids, supply, and power costs. Experienced IT specialists know how to design on-prem installations with redundancy, energy efficiency, and enhanced cooling in mind.
5. Make strategic ITOM investments
Companies are still investing in data centers and computing in 2026, but attitudes and expectations are different from previous years. A growing number of executives are calling for restraint. The focus is shifting to ROI, value extraction, and immediate revenue gains instead of a hypothetical pot of gold many years away.
Even SaaS companies are looking at AI through more serious eyes. With popular providers of AI coding tools like GitHub Copilot shifting to token-based or usage-based billing, developers are forced to calculate how cost-effective agentic tools and compute costs really are.
6. Move toward hybrid computing
Third-party data centers and infrastructure providers like AWS are convenient and flexible, but also expensive. On-prem servers provide more control over data security and often save a lot of money in the long run, but they require local IT expertise.
With the possibility of running open-source AI coding models locally, on-prem options are becoming increasingly attractive. But companies don’t want to give up the benefits of cloud computing either.
Hybrid data centers provide the best of both worlds, especially in an unpredictable environment. This option reduces the complexity of securing data center hardware and makes you less dependent on the whims of trillion-dollar companies.
If the complexity of managing IT teams is holding you back from on-prem benefits, hybrid IT outsourcing may be the answer. Many companies are using managed IT services or co-managed services to set up a secure data center.
7. Benefit from AI-driven resource optimization
Another way AI is helping organizations with IT operations is in extracting value from virtualization. Rising cloud computing costs aren’t necessarily inevitable. Some companies are finding that they rarely use the full amount of cloud capacity they pay for.
Predictive data models (e.g., “digital twins”) can provide a more accurate picture of average and peak usage for IT teams. Advanced hypervisor management platforms can deploy virtual machines more strategically, enabling SMBs to do more with less.
8. Use operations management software
Enterprise IT software can simplify operations management. This technology helps in-house IT professionals coordinate infrastructure maintenance, user behavior monitoring, resource usage, security patches, and many other tasks.
Some platforms also provide tools for automating analytics, alerts, and reminders. Automation addresses a common complaint from overloaded IT teams: feeling overwhelmed by too many data points. Advanced software helps you sift through the noise and make sure the key personnel receive the right metrics in real time.
9. Integrate IT operations and cybersecurity
Increases in AI-assisted phishing attacks and code vulnerabilities have made cybersecurity a necessary part of IT operations. High-profile disruptions — like the Salesforce ransomware attack in 2025 — show that cyberattacks can trigger debilitating shutdowns that hurt internal operations and extend to customers. Automated DDoS attacks driven by agentic AI also pose a threat.
That said, IT advancements can also strengthen network security. AI-driven vulnerability scanning, penetration testing, and real-time monitoring tools allow for superhuman flagging and response times.
With operations management and cybersecurity so intertwined, tech-savvy organizations are combining teams and resources. Eliminating red tape this way can speed up incident management, reduce costs, strengthen risk management, and improve early detection.
EXPERTS WHO FOLLOW IT OPERATIONS BEST PRACTICES
The ideal approach to ITOM depends on your company’s size, infrastructure needs, budget, and in-house IT resources. Technology can simplify things, but there’s no substitute for industry expertise, strategic decisions, and personnel who follow IT operations best practices.
At TSP, our team has decades of experience in operations management, infrastructure support, and managed IT services. Whether you need help with cloud-based, on-prem, or hybrid infrastructure, we can help you build a more reliable IT environment. Talk to TSP today to find the right IT outsourcing solution for your business.
