Is ITIL Better or DevOps?

Introduction to ITIL

ITIL stands for Information Technology Infrastructure Library. ITIL is a set of guidelines to manage IT services. The basic purpose of ITIL is to integrate IT services with business requirements. The guidelines and practices of ITIL assist organizations in mitigating risks, develop a strong connection with customers, implement cost-efficient strategies, and, most importantly helps to develop an IT environment that can elevate and adopt changes over time. ITIL is designed to regulate the planning, delivery, and maintenance of IT services within an organization’s operations. The purpose of ITIL is to enhance efficacy and accomplish expected service delivery.

Introduction to DevOps

DevOps stands for development and operations. It is a software development term used for a type of agile relationship between IT operations and development. From planning to the delivery of software, DevOps is responsible for enhancing collaboration and communication among the two business units. DevOps also enhances the eminence and frequency of the deployments. The use of DevOps increases innovation, risk-taking. DevOps helps to introduce a new product faster in the market. 

Scope of ITIL

Over the last 25 years, ITIL has been a backbone to many tech-based organizations. The service provided by ITIL has developed a unique value proposition for businesses. The continuous updates and improvement have only made ITIL services stronger. However, what impacted the most are the core practices of ITIL that have helped businesses to reach their aims and objectives, bring alterations to business when needed, and enhance the user experience. What makes the future of ITIL bright are three approaches; holistic, supportive, and integrated. ITIL has its own set of strengths and weaknesses. However, it focuses on the necessities of the IT experts and delivers high value to the business through improving its weak models. The core practices of ITIL are supported by additional context-based materials where enterprises of all extents and geographies can get guidance regarding change.

 Scope of DevOps

The use of DevOps has reduced the manual approvals of humans. The traditional IT departments have been replaced with DevOps. According to Grand View Research, it is predicted that the market size of DevOps will reach 12.85 billion dollars by 2025. These stats reveal the rise in cloud technologies, digitation of organizations to mechanize business operations through adopting agile frameworks. The future of DevOps can be seen as it brings the disconnected components in the progression, placement, and delivery of software into a single chain. DevOps is bringing changes to the roles and titles of jobs. Many roles are eliminated, while many have been increased by the scale of microservice architectures. DevOps can only be fully achieved with strong team communication. 

ITIL Vs. DevOps

Since we have discussed the scope of ITIL and DevOps above, let’s now get to the differences between the two technologies:

1. ITIL is the guidelines provided to IT service management to operate efficiently. Whereas, DevOps is the integration of software development and delivery that amalgamates the development and operations.
2. The primary focus of ITIL is to provide quality service and steadiness. However, DevOps aligns software testing and quality assurance with the development and achieves the quality through collaborating and communicating with product management, software development, and deployment teams.
3. DevOps emphasizes on continuous delivery and integration while ITIL focuses on achieving higher customer satisfaction
4. ITIL is based on 26 processes, which are part service lifecycle. However, with DevOps, principles such as work in progress and work in batches are aligned with agile to achieve fast turnaround time.
5. DevOps drives in the cultural transformation whereas, ITIL brings in the digital transformation.
6. ITIL provides different methods with every aspect of end to end service management. ITIL focuses on covering a range of people, products, and processes, whereas, DevOps communicates with developers, testers, and IT operations teams to deploy code and produce rapidly.
7. The roles required for ITIL includes business relationship manager, demand manager, financial manager, ISG, and service strategy manager. However, with DevOps, the roles required are release manager, software developer, security professional, the automation architect, and experience assurance professional.
8. ITIL works on functions, processes, and roles, and a function unit that is responsible for performing certain tasks and responsible for its outcomes. The process enhances synchronization and manages functions. The two are aligned together to meet the objective. With DevOps, the roles of every individual are well-defined, and all they have to do is work together while monitoring the processes.

Can ITIL and DevOps Work Together?

In comparison to ITIL, DevOps is a new IT service delivery model. However, it still has many aspects that are, when combined with the organization’s operations and ITIL, can produce tremendous results.

Organizations that use both models by collaborating it with objectives achieve improved results as the two models highly emphasize continuous improvement. As ITIL is the set of best practices, it does not mean that all practices would suit your organization; however, you can adopt a few of the practices which support your business operations. These practices can be combined with the valuable aspects of DevOps.  ITIL’s service design process supports the iterative and incremental design and the execution of service automation. The two form an integrated feature of the DevOps model. Several Information Technology Service Management managers continuously strive to carry out the process like service design and evaluate the benefits each aspect of DevOps offers. DevOps provides employees with leverage to resolve issues and make decisions over other matters. Using ITIL and DevOps together is a modern and integrated approach. The two models support each other. DevOps boosts the ITIL and ITIL improves DevOps.

Many organizations fail to integrate the two models due to a lack of knowledge. Luckily, QuickStart has a solution for that. QuickStart provides online ITIL training, which can help your employees learn more about ITIL practices. Similarly, for DevOps, QuickStart offers Linux courses. These courses will help train employees and make the best use by integrating the two models. To learn more, contact our experts at QuickStart.