Managing Risks with
ITIL Best Practices
Introduction
Information Technology (IT) helps organizations
achieve operational efficiencies, reduce costs
and enhance your competitive position in your
marketplace. In many instances, implementing and
following Best Practices helps you
meet your business needs while enhancing IT
quality and value.
Best Practices
Altius IT’s Best Practices follow an extensive
set of management procedures to:
- Facilitate the delivery of high quality
IT services
- Minimize risks
- Help your organization meet its business
needs
Our Best Practices are a framework of
processes, functions, planning, delivery, and
management of IT services. Altius IT’s Best
Practices are based on the Information
Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL®), the
most widely accepted approach of Best Practices.
Service Support
Best practices ensure that high quality IT
services are delivered so that management and
users have the tools needed to perform their
duties. By promoting quality, Altius IT works
with your organization to ensure information
system business effectiveness and efficiency.
Altius IT ensures that a comprehensive,
consistent, and coherent set of service support
Best Practices include:
- Service desk
- Incident management
- Problem management
- Configuration management
- Change management
- Release management
Service Delivery
IT service must be delivered in a way that
offers your business users adequate support, when and
where you need it. Service delivery includes:
- Service level management
- Financial management for IT services
- IT service continuity management
(contingency planning)
- Availability management
- Contingency planning
- Capacity management
Service Management
Altius IT helps you align IT
services with the needs of your business. We
identify your firm’s strengths, weaknesses, and
gaps in services. Where the business
requirements are not being met, we help you
develop an Action Plan to ensure
that IT meets the current and future needs of
your business.
Altius IT evaluates the current maturity levels
of service management and recommends
improvements to processes. We evaluate the firm
and compare with industry Best Practices for the
support and delivery of IT services.
We provide your organization with a framework
that aligns IT with your firm’s business needs. Our
approach reviews your firm's approach to continuous
service improvement including:
- Creating a vision
- Analyzing the organization
- Setting goals
- Implementing IT service management
- Measuring progress towards goals using
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) E-Discovery Primer
Security Management
Information is one of the organization’s most
important assets. Without security, your organization does not have information
confidentiality, availability, and integrity.
Anything that threatens information or the
processing of that information directly
endangers the performance of your organization.
Altius IT helps your organization build the
foundation for the management of the IT
Infrastructure. Security management is primarily
responsibility of the business, with IT security
personnel responsible for establishing and
managing security policies and procedures.
Business Perspective
Your organization is increasingly dependent on
the delivery of high quality IT services. These
services must constantly adapt and change as
your
business continues to evolve over time.
Altius IT’s Best Practices helps you develop
and deliver quality IT services that maximize
business objectives and benefits. To achieve the
greatest possible benefits to your business, Altius
IT helps IT personnel develop
a keen understanding of your organization's key
principles and requirements. Our services help
IT deliver the greatest benefits including:
- Contributing to business objectives
- Developing IT services in line with
those objectives
- Assisting the business exploit their IT
resource to the maximum
- Building an integrated culture within
the business
- Enabling change and innovation for
business advantage
Altius IT’s services include a review of:
- Corporate strategy
- IT governance
- Change processes
- Business continuity
- IT asset management
- In and outsourcing
- Knowledge management
Altius IT’s business continuity services
review the responsibilities and opportunities
available to each business manager to improve
what is, in most organizations, one of the key
contributing services to business efficiency and
effectiveness.
IT infrastructure changes can impact the manner
in which business is conducted or the continuity
of business operations. It is important that
business managers are aware of these changes and
implement the steps necessary to ensure that
steps are taken to safeguard your business from
adverse side effects.
Infrastructure Management
Altius IT’s infrastructure management
processes recommend Best Practices for
requirements analysis, planning, design,
deployment and ongoing operations management and
technical support of your organization’s IT
infrastructure. Altius IT ensures that Best
Practices are developed for management and user
equipment and services:
- Design and planning
- Deployment management
- Operations management
- Technical support
Our design and planning services provide a
framework and approach for the strategic and
technical design and planning of IT
infrastructures. Altius IT’s services include
the necessary combination of business and
overall IT strategy. Design and planning drives
both the procurement of new IT solutions and
strategic business change. Key outputs from
design and planning are:
- IT strategies, policies, and plans
- Overall IT architecture and management
architecture
- Feasibility studies
Our deployment management provides a
framework for the successful management of
design, build, test and roll-out (deploy)
projects. It includes many project management
disciplines but has a broader focus to include
the necessary integration of release management
and module and system testing.
Altius IT's operations management services
provide the day-to-day technical supervision of
your IT infrastructure. Our operations services
review incidents reported by users as well as
events generated by or recorded by the IT
infrastructure. Operations may work closely
alongside incident management and the service
desk, which are not-necessarily technical in
order to provide an 'operations bridge'.
Operations should primarily work from documented
processes and procedures and should be concerned
with a number of specific issues including:
- Output management
- Job scheduling
- Backup and restore
- Network monitoring and management
- System monitoring management
- Database monitoring management
- Storage monitoring management
Operations management is responsible for:
- A stable, secure IT infrastructure
- Up-to-date operational documentation
- Log of all operational events
- Maintenance of operational monitoring
and management tools
- Operational Scripts
Altius IT ensures that technical support
provides support to other areas, both in
infrastructure management and service
management. Technical support, provides a number
of functions including:
- Research and evaluation
- Market intelligence (i.e. design and
planning and capacity management)
- Proof of concept and prototypes
- Special technical expertise to
operations and problem management
- Operational documentation or Known Error
Data Base
Application Management
Altius IT's application management services
include a set of Best Practices to improve the
overall quality of IT software development and
support through the life-cycle of software
development projects. Our services
emphasize the gathering and defining of
requirements that meet your business objectives.
Altius IT provides details on business change
with the emphasis on clear requirement
definitions and the implementation of solutions
to meet business users' needs.
Software Asset Management
Operating system and application software is
critical to the success of your organization.
Altius IT’s software asset management procedures
helps you maximize your IT
investment. Our services help your organization
manage all of the infrastructure and processes
necessary for the effective management, control
and protection of the software assets within
your firm.
Altius IT ensures Best Practices that protect
your
organization’s investment in software assets.
Benefits of Altius IT’s services include:
- Cost savings. Organizations save
money on licensing costs by increasing use
of volume licensing agreements. With
centralized procurement, organizations
ensure they buy only what is needed and get
the best possible price.
- Asset protection. With an
effective software asset management plan in
place, an organization knows exactly what
software and hardware is installed on the
network, making it easier to identify what
is needed to manage technological change,
and easier to protect and secure data
through effective patch management.
- Reduced IT administration.
Standardized workstations lead to reduced
training and support costs and increased
software compatibility.
Summary
Each organization has a unique
environment that makes it difficult to protect
against new and emerging threats.
Network and
security assessments help organizations identify,
manage, and reduce their risks. Contact us
about our Policy Templates, approximately 50
templates that give you a jump start on
information security, business continuity, etc.
Publication and Author Information
Jim
Kelton is president of Altius IT, an IT risk
management consulting company based in Santa
Ana,
California. Mr. Kelton has over 30 years of
experience in the Information Technology
industry and is recognized as a security expert.
He is certified by the Information Systems Audit
and Control Association (ISACA) as a Certified
Information Systems Auditor (CISA). Jim Kelton
Altius Information Technologies, Inc.
1506 Brookhollow Drive, Suite 122
Santa Ana, CA 92705
(714) 442-6670
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