IT and development roles have been in a continual state of flux over the past several years. CIOs and IT managers must immerse themselves in the business while staying on top of the latest cloud and software architectures. DevOps principles have taken a strong hold in IT organizations because they offer the best path toward reliable, innovative, and flexible applications and customer experiences. Developers are expected to release code faster and collaborate closely with testers and business analysts.
But where does that leave IT operations? Too often, these trends bypass ops teams entirely. In large organizations, when a major incident occurs, it still triggers war rooms full of IT administrators and security engineers scanning dashboards and parsing metrics to determine how to restore a service. That reactive approach takes too long and wastes skilled people.
IT operations professionals need to evolve alongside the rest of the organization. According to an OpsRamp survey cited in the original source article, 64 percent of IT leaders said they value DevOps skills in IT operations candidates. Three underlying realities are driving this shift:
- Many companies are now software companies as much as they are product or service companies.
- Customers and employees expect consumer-grade functionality and performance from internal and external business applications.
- Waiting months for the next patch or high-demand update is no longer acceptable — those delays affect productivity and create real risks to revenue and customer loyalty.
The following five DevOps skills and mindset shifts will help IT operations professionals meet these demands, whether they are looking for their next role or positioning themselves for a promotion.
1. Fanatical Customer Focus
Traditionally, the development team was effectively the customer of the IT operations organization. Developers would request a server with certain specifications, IT would push back on scope, and both sides would negotiate an environment somewhere in between. That model is obsolete.
Modern DevOps requires a fundamental shift: user experience becomes the north star for every decision. Instead of focusing primarily on provisioning servers and managing production environments, IT operations professionals need to elevate their thinking to the end-user outcome. That means understanding who the customers are, what motivates them, and what friction points they experience. In practice, this requires IT ops professionals to leave the back office and engage directly with business stakeholders to build that perspective.
2. Broader Business Context
IT metrics need to align with business outcomes, not just infrastructure health. IT operations must understand the top priorities in each business function, which business services support those priorities, and how the underlying IT infrastructure connects to each. With that map in place, when something breaks, the team can quickly prioritize what matters most to the business at that specific moment — rather than treating all alerts with equal weight.
Developing this alignment means having regular conversations with senior leadership — not just during incidents, but as part of routine planning. It also means investing in operational data analytics skills. Business service visibility — understanding how infrastructure-level events translate into business-level impact — is increasingly a core competency for senior operations engineers. The faster you can trace a user-facing problem to its root cause using business-context data, the more valuable you become to the organization.
3. Expanding Monitoring into the CI/CD Toolchain
Monitoring in a DevOps context serves a fundamentally different purpose than traditional infrastructure monitoring. Rather than simply checking whether servers and network links are up, DevOps-oriented monitoring tracks the services that end-users are consuming — and, critically, feeds that data back into the development pipeline.
Within a CI/CD toolchain, monitoring data is a feedback loop. It surfaces errors and performance regressions while engineers are still actively coding and deploying, enabling faster course corrections before problems reach production at scale. IT operations professionals should become familiar with the full spectrum of tooling involved: source code repositories, build and deployment tools, automated testing frameworks, release and change management platforms, and application performance monitoring (APM) solutions.
Many organizations are now integrating DevOps tooling with traditional IT infrastructure monitoring to create a unified view of reliability and performance across every stage of the software delivery lifecycle. Operations engineers who can work across both layers are in high demand.
4. Embracing Calculated Risk
By nature, IT operations professionals are risk-averse. Their core mandate is to keep systems running, secure, and meeting defined SLAs. That instinct is valuable — but it needs to be balanced with a willingness to experiment.
The “fail fast” principle that developers apply to shipping software increasingly applies to operations as well. Chaos engineering — the practice of intentionally injecting failures into a system to identify weaknesses before a real incident exposes them — is a concrete example. Tools like Netflix’s Chaos Monkey popularized this approach, and it has since become a legitimate discipline with its own frameworks and certifications.
The key is that taking on risk in this context is deliberate and bounded. A deeper understanding of system tolerances, blast radius, and rollback procedures makes experimentation safe. Operations professionals who learn to design controlled experiments — whether testing a new observability tool, validating a DR runbook, or stress-testing a Kubernetes cluster — develop intuition that purely reactive ops work never provides.
5. Continuous Improvement and Learning
Adopting a DevOps mindset means committing to continuous learning as a professional habit, not an occasional event. The tooling landscape evolves rapidly: container orchestration, cloud-native storage, infrastructure-as-code, GitOps workflows, and AI-assisted observability platforms have all emerged or matured significantly in recent years, and the pace shows no sign of slowing.
IT operations professionals should regularly audit their current processes and ask what can be automated, streamlined, or eliminated. If you have an interest in programming, invest in developing at least foundational coding skills. Organizations like Google have long recruited IT administrators who combine operational expertise with basic programming ability — not because ops engineers need to write production application code, but because understanding how software is built leads to faster, more accurate diagnosis when things go wrong.
Strong collaboration habits — using shared tooling, documenting runbooks, participating in blameless post-mortems — are also part of this continuous improvement culture. These practices create institutional knowledge that makes the whole team more resilient, not just the individual.
The Bottom Line
IT operations is becoming more central to business performance every day as organizations migrate workloads to the cloud, expand their application footprints, and depend on digital services to generate revenue and serve customers. The operations professionals who thrive in this environment will be those who combine deep technical expertise with business awareness, a customer-first mindset, and a genuine appetite for learning. Developing these five DevOps skills is a practical roadmap for getting there.