What is ITIL?

IT Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, is the only consistent and comprehensive documentation of best practice for IT Service Management. It's used by thousands of organisations around the world, including NASA, the UK National Health Service (NHS), HSBC bank and Disney™.


ITIL preaches that IT services must be “in sync” to the needs of the business and should reinforce the core business processes. It provides guidance to organisations on how to use IT as a tool to facilitate business change, transformation and growth.


The ITIL Service Lifecycle begins with the identification of customer needs and drivers of IT requirements, through to the design and implementation of the service into operation and finally, on to the monitoring and improvement phase of the service.


Some of the benefits of adopting ITIL include:

• improved IT services
• reduced costs
• improved customer satisfaction
• improved productivity
• improved use of skills and experience
• improved delivery of third party service

ITIL Integrates Security Management

Computer Weekly reports that security management processes are to be integrated into ITIL certifications. ITIL V3 ISO 27001 is to remain a key component of ITIL methodology, but new security activities will be included.

ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) began life as a collection of guide books on IT management practice. Then in 2001 the books were consolidated in order to standardise processes for IT service delivery strategy as well as day-to-day IT service support.

ITIL has prevously not included guidance on IT security procedures, as it was considered to be the responsibility of the then-emerging information security management code of practice. This was first published in 1995 and led to the ISO 27000 series of standards.