IT Service Desk

The ITIL definition of the IT Service Desk (service operation) is the single point of contact between the service provider and the users. A typical service desk manages incidents and service requests and handles communication with the users. The service desk typically has a help desk component, but its overall goal is to be proactive in improving IT and business processes across the organization. The best service desks are constantly looking for opportunities to run all IT processes, including the help desk, more efficiently. Some key traits of the service desk are:

• Fully integrating with other ITSM processes
• Acting as SPOC for all IT areas, applications, and business processes
• Tracking compliance with service level agreements (SLAs)
• Providing a self-service capability for incident and service requests, with an integrated service catalog
• Integrating and communicating with the configuration management database (CMDB)

Operations Managed by Service Desk in ITIL

• Network Operations: It is the ability to monitor the network connections and devices connected to the network remotely. The service desk has to monitor the changes, incidents, and traffic in the network and ensures that the network infrastructure is optimized for the operations of the organization.
• Systems Operations: It is the ability to manage the core systems of the company. It includes monitoring the performance of the systems, installing software updates, patches and managing changes and support for different platforms used in the company’s systems.

source: Invensis

• Database Operations: It is the ability of the service desk to maintain the database by monitoring its performance, reviewing the logs, managing the access and changing control for certain database software such as Oracle.
• Security Management: It is the ability to protect the organization from internal and external security threats. The duty of the service desk is to check for vulnerabilities in the IT infrastructure, monitor the access logs and correlate the data available with the security mandates.