ITIL: Information Technology Infrastructure Library

Organizations must establish a documented service strategy that clearly maps IT services provided by the data center to specific business outcomes and customer requirements.

This includes defining service portfolio elements, analyzing market demands, establishing financial models for service delivery, and creating strategic plans for service expansion or consolidation.

Data centers must demonstrate how infrastructure capabilities support business objectives through documented service descriptions that specify performance characteristics, dependencies, and interdependencies with other organizational services.

Data center operations must design IT services with explicit SLA frameworks that define availability targets (expressed as percentages, e.g., 99.9%, 99.99%), response times for different incident categories, bandwidth guarantees, and security requirements.

Service design documentation must include capacity planning models, scalability strategies, and disaster recovery provisions with specified Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).

Design reviews must address security, availability, performance, and manageability, with documented evidence that infrastructure designs can support committed service levels under specified operating conditions.

All infrastructure changes, upgrades, and deployments must follow a structured change management process that includes impact analysis, risk assessment, and Change Advisory Board (CAB) approval.

Data centers must maintain a Configuration Management Database (CMDB) documenting all infrastructure components, their relationships, versions, and current status.

Release management procedures must define how changes are packaged, tested, and deployed to production environments with documented rollback procedures, and service transition planning must ensure minimal business disruption through communication plans and staff training initiatives.

Data centers must establish incident management procedures that classify incidents by priority and urgency levels, with defined target resolution times (e.g., P1: 4-hour response, 8-hour resolution; P2: 8-hour response, 24-hour resolution; P3: 24-hour response, 72-hour resolution).

Problem management processes must conduct root cause analysis for recurring incidents, documenting known errors and developing permanent solutions or workarounds.

Operational procedures must include event management for automated monitoring and alerting, request fulfillment for standard service requests, and access management controls for user provisioning and deprovisioning across data center services.

Organizations must establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each service and operational process, conducting regular reviews (typically monthly or quarterly) to measure performance against targets and baseline metrics.

Data centers must implement Service Improvement Plans (SIPs) addressing identified gaps, with documented evidence of measurement, analysis, and corrective actions.

The framework requires establishment of a Continual Service Improvement register documenting improvement initiatives, implementation status, and realized benefits, ensuring systematic enhancement rather than ad-hoc improvements.

Data centers must maintain authoritative and current Configuration Management Databases (CMDBs) documenting all infrastructure components from physical hardware (servers, storage, networking equipment) to logical components (virtual machines, applications, licenses) with defined relationships and dependencies.

The CMDB must be integrated with change management and incident management processes to ensure configuration accuracy impacts decision-making.

Regular configuration audits must verify that actual infrastructure matches documented configurations, with processes to update CMDBs when discrepancies are identified during physical inventories or infrastructure inspections.

ITIL requires comprehensive documentation of all processes, procedures, runbooks, and decision criteria within a Knowledge Management System (KMS) or equivalent documentation repository accessible to relevant personnel.

Data center operations must maintain incident and problem records, solution databases documenting resolutions to common issues, and architectural documentation describing infrastructure design decisions.

The framework mandates regular review and updates to ensure documentation remains current and useful, with version control and configuration management applied to all operational documentation to prevent reliance on outdated procedures.

Data centers must establish supplier and vendor management processes that define service requirements for external providers (cloud services, hardware vendors, telecommunications providers), establish Service Level Agreements with suppliers, and monitor compliance with defined SLAs.

Organizations must maintain contracts that clearly specify performance expectations, support response times, escalation procedures, and remedies for non-compliance.

Regular supplier reviews must assess performance against agreements, identify improvement opportunities, and address service delivery issues through documented corrective action processes.