Glossary
IT Manager Terms & Vocabulary
15 essential IT manager terms with plain-English definitions: the vocabulary you’ll hear in training and on day one.
Key IT manager vocabulary
These 15 terms come up constantly in IT manager training, on the job and in interviews. Knowing them helps you follow instructions, document accurately and sound prepared.
- Business continuity
- Keeping operations running during disruptions.
- CapEx and OpEx
- Capital and operating expenses.
- Change management
- Controlling changes to systems.
- Cloud migration
- Moving systems to cloud services.
- Disaster recovery
- Restoring systems after major failures.
- Governance
- Policies and oversight for IT.
- Incident management
- Restoring service after disruptions.
- IT strategy
- A plan for how technology supports business goals.
- ITSM
- IT service management.
- KPI
- Key performance indicator.
- Risk assessment
- Evaluating threats and impacts.
- SLA
- Service level agreement.
- Total cost of ownership
- All costs of a technology over time.
- Vendor management
- Overseeing suppliers.
- Zero trust
- A security model that verifies every access.
Practice these terms
Test yourself with the free IT Manager practice test: it includes vocabulary questions built from this list. For a complete course, see IT Manager training.
Browse terms from every career in our career glossary.