ITIL stands for the IT Infrastructure Library, an internationally accepted IT service delivery framework. The ITIL recommends best practices for IT service management (ITSM) to support the standardization of various processes and stages in the IT lifecycle.

The ITIL started in the 1980s when the United Kingdom’s Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency (CCTA) saw a need to establish standardized guidelines to avoid inconsistencies among the increasingly diverse IT architectures. 

The first version of ITIL was released in 1989, but the framework continues to be revised, overseen by Axelos. The current iteration, ITIL 4, has evolved to meet IT administrators’ needs adapting to newer IT management approaches. Thus, along with providing best practices for incident management and continual improvement, it also addresses cloud computing, automation, AI, DevOps, Agile and more