It's a brave new world for IT. And it often seems impossible to predict future demand and guard against performance risks. You have mountains of data, scalable cloud infrastructures, and a complex web of IT environments. It's complicated, to say the least.  And it's matched by skyrocketing consumer demand for and reliance on online services. Bottom line: outages are more...

An up-to-date and comprehensive runbook won't win you any awards. But when you get the green light to implement a workload automation tool, documentation is your lifeline. Unfortunately, most runbooks aren’t up to snuff.

While IT managers agree that service level management (SLM) is critical to their organizations, many also find it intimidating. It need not be. An SLM program is what you make it - it can be formal or informal, all-encompassing or focused on key services. The point is to document required service levels for services provided to the business by the IT organization. Service...