IT Management Buyers’ Guide 2025

State of the market: IT management software makes it easier for IT teams to oversee, coordinate, and maintain their organizations’ IT infrastructure. They typically encompass network and device monitoring, asset tracking, performance analysis, and incident management.

• The IT management market comprises multiple different types of solution, but we’re seeing substantial growth across most areas within this software category—including across managed IT services.
  • The IT Operations Management (ITOM) market was valued at USD 50.7 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 10.9% between 2024 and 2030.
  • The managed IT services market was valued at USD 238.38 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 8.8% between 2025 and 2033 to reach a value of USD 509.9 billion.
• Growth is being driven by a need to meet evolving security and compliance requirements, and the increasing complexity of IT environments.
  • As organizations continue to embrace mobile, IoT and OT devices, utilize edge computing, and adopt hybrid- and multi-cloud strategies, it can be difficult to keep all the different cogs turning smoothly… and securely.
  • IT management solutions can help minimize visibility gaps, improve resource allocation and operational coordination, and reduce operational costs.

Why trust us: We’ve researched, demoed, and tested several leading IT management solutions, spoken to organizations of all sizes about their IT management challenges and the features that are most useful to them, and interviewed executives from leading providers in the IT management space.

You can find our product reviews, interviews, and Top 10 shortlists to the best IT management products on the market in our IT Management Hub.

Our recommendations: Before we jump into the details, here are our top tips on how to get the most out of your IT management implementation:

• For busy IT teams: Utilize your tool’s automation capabilities as much as possible. They’ll not only help you reduce your team’s workload and administrative overhead, but also minimize risk and improve security. 
• For large and growing organizations: Look for a solution that can support a large amount of infrastructure so that you don’t experience any pain points with it as your organization grows.
• For ease of management: IT management solutions cover a lot of ground, which can make them tricky to manage if you don’t choose the right one. Look for a unified platform that offers integrated features that play well together, and which you can manage from a single, centralized admin console.
• For longevity: Embrace the cloud! We’re seeing a huge shift at the moment towards cloud and hybrid cloud infrastructure, so embracing a cloud-based IT management solution will help you stay ahead of that trend and prevent you having to migrate it further down the line. 

How IT management solutions work: IT management solutions help mid-size and large enterprises oversee, manage, and streamline their IT infrastructure and processes more effectively. They can be deployed on-prem, in the cloud, or as a hybrid solution, depending on your organization’s requirements. For example, if you want a solution that carries out inventory tracking, you’ll need to install on-prem agents, but the management console may be hosted in the cloud.

Because they support such a broad range of IT processes and activities, IT management solutions are typically made up of multiple applications that all perform key functions and integrate with one another for easier management once installed. These applications often include a combination of:

• Asset discovery and management
• Real-time network monitoring and performance analysis
• Patch management
• Risk management
• Incident management
• Compliance and reporting
• Event-based alerting
• IT automation

Benefits of IT management: There are four main benefits to implementing an IT management solution:

1. Improve visibility over your IT operations.
   • IT management solutions give you greater visibility over all the activities happening within your IT infrastructure. 
   • You can use this visibility to identify areas that are performing well in addition to areas for improvement, where further resources may be necessary. 
2. Minimize risk and improve the security of your IT infrastructure.
   • Many aspects of IT management can help you reduce your organization’s cyber risk.
   • For example, patch management secures your operating systems and software against vulnerabilities that could be exploited by threat actors, and risk management helps you identify and remediate high-risk configurations and potential compliance breaches. 
   • Not only do these features bolster your defenses against cyberthreats, but they can also help you achieve and maintain compliance with federal and industry data protection standards.
3. Improve incident and issue management. 
   • By continuously monitoring your IT environment and alerting you in real-time to any issues it detects, IT management solutions help you identify and remediate incidents more quickly. This minimizes downtime and ensures that critical systems and services stay operational should you experience a performance outage or cyberattack. 
   • By recording all incidents in a single, centralized system and automatically creating tickets for them (often based on incident type, impact, and severity), these solutions allow you to avoid duplication of effort, make sure that no incident goes overlooked or undetected, and address high-priority issues first.
   • By helping you standardize your incident response processes and escalation procedures, an IT management solution can reduce confusion when an issue arises, ensure consistent responses across your team, and overall help speed up resolution time. 
   • By offering collaboration tools such as chat, tagging, notes, and even integrating knowledge bases that provide technicians with access to past incident documentation, these solutions improve teamwork across departments or shifts and empower junior team members to handle issues effectively. 
4. Reduce operational costs.  
   • Although the initial implementation cost may be relatively high, IT management solutions can save you money in the long term by enabling you to automate manual processes, which reduces the cost and administrative overhead associated with manual task execution. This also enables your IT team to focus their attention where it’s most needed, such as on strategic initiatives or incident response.
   • IT management solutions also help you ensure all your systems are running efficiently, and identify which systems and processes are the most useful for your organization, allowing you to allocate resources and budget to those areas, rather than ones that are seldom being used. 

Common IT management challenges: There are a few common challenges that you might come across when implementing an IT management solution. Here’s what they are and how to overcome them:

1. Because they comprise so many different tools and features, IT management solutions can be tricky to integrate with your existing infrastructure—particularly if you’re using lots of legacy systems. To help simplify this process, we recommend choosing a vendor that offers native integration with as many of your current systems as possible. Some vendors also offer onboarding and integration support, which may be worth considering if you think you might need additional support.
2. IT management tools may revoke users’ access to certain systems or change the ways in which they work entirely, which may cause some users to be resistant to the implementation or become frustrated. To combat this, you should provide training to your end users to make them aware of any changes to the way they work. This should include documentation that they can look back on if they forgot how to do something the “new” way.
3. If not configured correctly, and particularly if you have lots of siloed systems or data, IT management solutions may only provide you with limited visibility. To avoid this and make sure you’re getting the most out of your solution, we recommend mapping out all the infrastructure within your organization so you can ensure everything is covered, or finding a solution that can do this for you as part of the implementation process.

Best IT management providers: Our team of software analysts and researchers have put together a shortlist of the best providers of IT management solutions, as well as adjacent lists covering similar topics:

• The Top 8 Enterprise IT Management Software
• The Top 8 RMM Solutions
• The Top 11 IT Service Management (ITSM) Solutions
• The Top 9 Microsoft 365 Management Tools
• The Top 9 Remote Management Tools For Windows
• The Top 11 Patch Management Software For Business

Features checklist: When comparing IT management solutions, Expert Insights recommends looking for the following features:

1. Asset discovery, inventory, and management: The solution should create a map of all your IT assets and enable you to easily view and manage dependencies, configurations, and licences. It should also provide you with information on asset usage. This will help you make decisions regarding resource allocation, maintenance, and upgrades.
2. Network management: The solution should allow you to manage network devices such as firewalls, routers, switches, and access points to ensure they’re all running securely and at optimal performance levels.
3. Patch management: The solution should enable you to identify operating system and software vulnerabilities that need patching, as well as administer the relevant patches.
4. Incident and ticket management: The solution should automatically log all incidents or issues and create tickets for them based on the incident’s type, potential impact, and severity. As team members take actions to resolve the incident, the solution should track those actions.
5. Change management: The solution should document changes to IT systems.
6. SLA management: The solution should track service level agreements and send you alerts when thresholds are at risk. 
7. Knowledge base: You should be able to store FAQs and solutions/documentation from previous incident response actions for quick reference and faster problem-solving.
8. Monitoring and alerts: The solution should monitor your environment in real-time and alert you to any performance issues or outages, compliance violations, and security incidents or breaches.
9. Reporting and analytics: You should be able to log into a central management interface to access insights into IT performance and security through dashboards and customizable reports.
10. Automation capabilities: The solution should automate repetitive tasks like ticket routing and patch management to save time.
11. Integration support: You should be able to integrate the solution with other tools in your IT stack, such as email, collaboration platforms, and third-party security tools like antivirus software, intrusion prevention systems, vulnerability management software, and firewalls.

Further Reading: You can find all our articles on enterprise IT management in our IT Management Hub.

Want to jump right in? Here are a few articles we think you’ll enjoy: 

• Shortlist: The Top 8 Enterprise IT Management Software
• Interview: Raffael Marty On How MSPs Can Secure Their Customers Amid A Turbulent Threat Landscape
• Blog: What Are Best Practices for Patch Management – A Step-by-Step Guide
• Blog: Patch Management Statistics and Trends in 2025