In late 2019, ServiceNow announced they were embracing DevOps integrations with a variety of platforms. The organization acknowledged that the current DevOps frameworks forced much faster deployments than traditional IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) requires. As industries turned to the cloud, these faster frameworks, agility, and scalability needed to be coupled with consistent, repeatable processes, along with the transparency that ServiceNow provides. So a new ServiceNow Azure DevOps integration simply made sense.
ServiceNow Azure Integration — Why It Makes Sense
The Azure ServiceNow integration makes perfect sense. The Azure cloud offers opportunities to reach new markets faster with a host of innovation while still lowering costs. But organizations face big challenges when attempting a cloud-first strategy. As they transition applications and workflows to the cloud, IT teams must also have the same governance and security typically found in their on-premise and private cloud architectures. That’s exactly where the ServiceNow Azure made the most sense.
ServiceNow is software designed to support IT service management (ITSM). The entire platform is based on ITIL principals. It’s a modern work management tool, helping companies control tasks, leverage data, and design workflows.
Traditionally, ITIL frameworks like ServiceNow provided risk management, strengthened customer relationships, set cost-effective business practices, and built a stable IT environment. It was the right framework at the right time to bring together a ServiceNow Azure DevOps integration.
Understanding Microsoft Azure Cloud Agility
Microsoft Azure launched in 2010 as a cloud computing platform and full-service IT infrastructure. Microsoft has been adding to and improving Azure ever since. Today, Azure provides clients with Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) tools and frameworks, and it supports multiple programming languages, frameworks, and tools, including third-party systems and software.
Forbes reports that this is the year that enterprise organizations will have 83% of their IT workloads riding in the cloud. Within the next three years, Microsoft Azure, along with Google Cloud, will gain on Amazon AWH’s place as the overall market cloud leader.
Interestingly, Kinsta reports that, while Microsoft attained and holds market share for their products under the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model, ServiceNow is predicted to grow rapidly in the next ten years.
Understanding ServiceNow for IT Operations Management
ServiceNow is part of the software category known as IT Operations Management (ITOM), which is an administrative platform for control of storage, networking, connectivity, software, and services within an organization.
ServiceNow gives IT teams the ability to manage their entire IT environment, including cloud and virtual infrastructures. The tool lets IT teams map services, product delivery, and quality assurance, allowing IT teams to create a single source of truth for product and service delivery. ServiceNow can automate basic IT functions such as incident reporting, trouble ticket workflows, events, or other key processes. ServiceNow is a change management tool that helps technology teams create consistently integrated IT operations to improve service quality and overall efficiency.
Now imagine coupling these two powerful tools into one framework and you will start to understand how the ServiceNow Azure integration can drive DevOps and improve the functioning of your entire organization.
ServiceNow Azure DevOps Integration — Why It Matters
The ServiceNow Azure integration makes sense in so many ways. Enterprise organizations are adopting DevOps methodologies as part of their digital transformation strategies. However, these organizations, so often constrained by compliance rules, are often risk-averse. They have often embraced auditing, reporting, and other best practices to ensure security and lessen risk.
ServiceNow allows these organizations to manage the change associated with digital transformation effectively and consistently while still making use of DevOps benefits such as reduce deployment time, traceability, and transparency. The ServiceNow Azure integration ensures change authorization and tracking causes less friction for DevOps developer teams. Together, the Azure ServiceNow integration will bring together operations and development as they move toward a DevOps framework in the cloud.
Azure ServiceNow Integration — How It Works
ServiceNow is the end-to-end management platform for all the applications within the Azure cloud. With this integration, IT teams can:
- Adopt a single management system to handle their private and public Agile infrastructure.
- Use a robust self-service portal to track all of their cloud services.
- Provision cloud services automatically, including configured Virtual Networks.
- Leverage real-time visibility across servers, containers, and your entire Azure cloud ecosystem.
- Identify service issues and see the root causes quickly.
- Track cloud costs and simplify usage across your entire IT infrastructure.
The Azure ServiceNow integration uses Azure technology and provisioning tools, along with cloud IaaS and PaaS services, as well as the Azure billing API. This same consistency can even be applied to your private and hybrid frameworks to help you have more control and visibility.
Azure ServiceNow Integration — What Are the Benefits?
By integrating ServiceNow with Azure DevOps, enterprise organizations can smash through any barriers to collaboration between customer service and developer teams that could create delivery delays, diminish quality, or cause financial loss.
Enterprise organizations using the ServiceNow Azure integration experience some real benefits, including:
- Visibility around business requirements.
- Real-time access to prioritized customer trouble tickets.
- Automation eliminates manual communication on customer issues.
- Communication between native systems about trouble tickets.
- Real-time updates until the trouble ticket are resolved.
- Entire departments can speed up their decision-making.
- Teams can leverage the best tools for collaboration and management.
- Improve your responsiveness to customers and shift with market changes.
- Fully trace requirements as well as customer issues.
- Understand customer (both internal and external) priorities and requirements.
It’s important to note that the benefits of the ServiceNow Azure integration extend to customer service, human resources, security, and other business applications. Tools such as Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Workday can communicate more effectively across channels. ServiceNow works with Azure to automate basic tasks like predictive analytics, anomaly detection, peer benchmarking, and performance forecasting.
ServiceNow Azure DevOps Integration for Your Business
The new integration between Microsoft Azure and ServiceNow provides companies with the end-to-end management they require and the cloud speed and agility the market demands. Organizations leveraging the Service Now Azure integration can make use of an end-to-end integrated management platform for all of their cloud services.
Talk to the team at IES to discuss how this partnership can benefit your business. Our team can help you structure and manage your entire IT configuration. Call on us today.
