4 ways to manage IT teams' infrastructure effectively and improve ITSM processes

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What is IT infrastructure management in ITSM? 

IT infrastructure management aims to support the systems and storage necessary for performing efficient IT service management (ITSM) processes. IT infrastructure is traditionally hosted in an on-premises data center, especially when it comes to big organizations. Nevertheless, lately, Cloud providers have become more and more popular. As a result, IT teams' infrastructure management is focused on integrating IT objects between cloud-based and on-premises environments and maintaining data security across them. 

How to optimize IT infrastructure management? 

IT operations also support help desks and devices dedicated to strictly business needs so effective infrastructure management is crucial for company growth. In order to optimize all ITSM actions and development, enterprises need supporting tools. Fortunately, Jira Service Management brings DevOps to the Atlassian toolbox and makes it possible to deliver ITSM along with the software development lifecycle. How to make the most of this solution to manage the processes equally productive in enterprises of different scales? We selected some main points to take care of in the first place, so if you're interested in what we came up with, read on!

Bringing processes together in Jira Service Management

As it was mentioned before, Jira Service Management allows delivering DevOps processes together with Ops. Thanks to this, the tasks' progress, statuses, and data can be gathered in a single place and reported to all the stakeholders if needed. It allows for an increased customer impact and in the meantime, supports risk management and data security. The objects in Jira and Jira Service Management are fully traceable and it's easy for the team members to stay up to date with all the changes and updates. If a project requires more extended customer support, plugins from the Atlassian Marketplace can come in handy. Queues for Jira Service Management is our choice for supporting complex IT teams' infrastructure. 

Queues for Jira Service Management app lets you manage issues from multiple projects on a single screen. It's perfect for teams working with many Customer Portals. Our customers love to use Queues as a complementary solution to Scrum or Kanban boards or even as an advanced view to manage JQL filters. The Queues app connects Support, Dev, and Ops in one place, so it's useful for Project & IT Managers, Support Teams, as well as end users. All teams can benefit from queues, giving them insight into each other's work which leads to delivering top-notch ITSM. With Queues, you can collect issues from Jira Core, Jira Software, and Jira Service Management. It makes it possible to reduce the overall number of tasks scattered across Jira instances. 

Securing the data in Jira Service Management

Data security is a crucial factor equally in DevOps and ITSM processes. Nowadays, organizations only pick solutions with a secure architecture that allows them to control where data is stored and who has access to it. In the case of big companies that require multiple teams' and clients' collaboration, finding this kind of solution can be a real challenge. This is why we recommend sticking to well-known tools and extending their possibilities, especially when it comes to customer care. If Jira Service Management is a tool that you use at your company, we have an app that helps take care of data safety, My Requests Extension for Jira Service Management.

The app's features enable choosing which fields in Jira requests customers can add as columns, use as criteria, and globally limit their visibility for selected user groups. It allows for securing sensitive data. Jira Admins can manage access to requests faster and more effectively with user scopes. As an administrator, you have full control over the view and permissions at a click of a button. 

Focusing on collaboration in Jira Service Management 

Optimized collaboration between teams is important not only when it comes to working remotely. Each improvement in the communication process is less time spent on asking complementary questions. Having all tasks and teams in one tool is a great first step to being efficient. The Atlassian suite and Jira Service Management provide its users with this possibility. A familiar interface, known by the majority of specialists on the market, minimizes the necessity for additional training. Jira Service Management standalone is a high-level collaborative tool, but in order to make tasks and issues even more transparent, you can support your team by implementing additional tools, such as our bestseller, Extension for Jira Service Management. 

The app has a wide range of benefits, especially for Project Managers and Support Agents, but also the customers. It makes request forms on the Customer Portal organized and transparent. Dynamic Forms (available also as a separate app for Jira) feature enables quick and accurate request submission. Jira Bundled Fields group the context-related information for user convenience and higher performance. On the Request Details View your team and clients are able to display SLAs, assignee details, attachments, linked issues, and dates. It results in improved ITSM processes, thanks to more valuable insight from the customers and saved time for the Support team. 

Manual tasks automation in Jira Service Management 

Manual, repetitive tasks take lots of time and constitute a reason for frustration and burnout among employees. This is why solutions to automating tasks in Jira are dominating the IT market and their implementation is substantial if we don't want to stay behind. Jira and Jira Service Management allow multiple automation solutions and integrations. If we benefit from them, we will optimize our DevOps and ITSM processes. It leads to better communication between an organization and its customers, workflow improvements, as well as sooner releases and fixes. One of our apps, Issue Templates for Jira allows effective IT process automation by providing teams with Jira ticket templates and dedicated automation features. 

Issue Templates for Jira app allows the creation of Jira issues from templates. Teams can clone the whole epics with sub-tasks and related issues. It minimizes manual work and typing the same data over and over again, for example, in the case of onboarding, ticketing, or service requests. With our app, you can set up templates for these kinds of structures and use them as many times as you need with just slight modifications. Your Project Managers will appreciate the Autofill feature which enables them to enter a value once and use it in multiple places thanks to variables. Smart Defaults feature, on the other hand, makes fields inherit values from parent issues, such as components, and versions. What's more, Issue Templates make organizing tasks much faster. Managers can automatically assign tasks to the Project Lead or user creating issues. If you are interested in more ways Issue Templates can automate your work, we invite you to read the article about IT process automation on Deviniti's blog. 

As you can see, thanks to Jira Service Management we can efficiently optimize IT infrastructure management without introducing complex modifications that affect the work of the teams. If your company already uses JSM, there's no better way to significantly optimize internal processes and bring information flow to a higher level than with the Marketplace apps. We can proudly say, that our bestselling products were built based on our customers' needs. The plugins complement each other with functionalities and help organizations achieve their goals in no time. All of the extensions we talked about in this article are available for Cloud and Data Center hosting. 

How do you deal with managing IT infrastructure at your company? Do you have your favorite tools for the purpose? Let us know in the comments! 

Cheers, 

Kasia from Deviniti